ALT ... rain and rain, without stop yesterday, and just now it's beginning anew. Looking straight ahead, you'd think: it's going to snow. But last night I was awakened by the presence of moonlight in a corner above my rows of books; a spot that did not shine but covered a place on the wall like a patch of aluminum. And the room was full of cold night all the way into the corners; one could tell, lying in bed, that it was also under the wardrobe, under the chest of drawers and around the objects without any space in between, all around the brass chandeliers, which looked very cold. But the morning was bright. A broad east wind invading us with a developed front, because he finds the city so spacious. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne; tr. Joel Agee

ALT [presumably mid-July 1924] Dear Herr Doktor: I'm returning the book to you with thanks, please forgive me for not looking you up. I hardly think I could talk about Franz right now, and I'm sure you won't want to speak with me about him at this time either. With your permission, I'll let you know before I come to Prague in September. Please remember me kindly and please convey my best wishes to your wife, whom I once probably wronged without intending to. When you have the opportunity, please make sure my letters which belonged to Franz are burned; I trust you will do so, although of course this is nothing important. His manuscripts and diaries (not at all intended for me, since they were written before he knew me, about fifteen large notebooks) are here with me and, should you need them, are at your disposal. This is as he wished; he asked me not to show them to anyone but you and then only after he died. Perhaps you already know them in part.

ALT The Ninth Elegy; translated by Stephen Mitchell

ALT What I write, whatever it may be, liberates and captures at the same time. Sometimes I write under a terrible compulsion, like it or not, bowed by such obedience I start to suspect that what I'm doing so compulsively serves some devious purpose, I work blindly perhaps so as never to be free to write that book, which one, the one I am destined, by whom, not to write. Do I write? Is this writing this forever being on the lookout? Bent over the ground that I scratch dig scrape every morning at the first streaks of light, passing from the darkness of night to the night of day, I dontwrite. I sow, I dig holes, I follow blindly but guided drawn led by voices without sound that I hear breathing the world at me sentence by sentence.

ALT Always there's this urgent need to get out of my house my room my bed myself because of the eruption of dozens of strangers into my room my bed, this expulsion out of my own limits, my own walls, these impostures that push me out of myself and make a mockery of my idea of being at home and right away the door opens, it's always my mother or maybe the thought of my beloved who comes to the edge of the bed, rise and follow me I rise and we go down under the ground together there right away on the threshold always suddenly an empty subterranean passage a vast desert, a station without trains or a labyrinth with tiled walls. I follow you, I follow your idea, where are we going I say,

ALT The phrase 'Paradox Lust' is an allusive play on Milton's verse epic Paradise Lost and lust (jouis-sance). Through this slippage Paradise Lust thus mixes the pleasure of the Paradox, and the pleasure found in the lost paradise, the paradox that insinuates itself into the exchange between loss and pleasure [jouir]. [НС]

ALT We are two opium smokers each in his own cloud, seeing nothing outside, alone, never understanding each other we smoke, faces agonizing in a mirror, we are a frozen image to which time gives the illusion of movement, a snow crystal gliding over a ball of frost, the complexity of whose intertwinings no one can see, I am that drop of water condensed on the window of my living room, a rolling liquid pearl that knows nothing of the vapour that engendered it, nor of the atoms that still compose it but that, soon, will serve other molecules, other bodies, the clouds weighing heavy over Vienna tonight: over whose nape will this water stream, against what skin, on what pavement, towards what river, and this indistinct face on the glass is mine only for an instant, one of the millions of possible configurations of illusion - look, Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell

ALT Nowhereness To imagine is to absent oneself, writes Bachelard. Imagine, then, the absent body: here, there, or anywhere. Imagine it crossing the Mirabeau Bridge at night, as the dark Seine flows below, dreaming away its carnal resemblance— walking, simply to be nowhere with you.

ALT To imagine is to absent oneself, writes Bachelard. Imagine, then, the absent body: here, there, or anywhere. Imagine it crossing the Mirabeau Bridge at night, as the dark Seine flows below, dreaming away its carnal resemblance— walking, simply to be nowhere with you.

ALT Heart-shaped stone on the sand

ALT ERREUR 404 À la recherche de la page perdue Cette page n'existe pas, ou plus — le lien est peut-être erroné, ou la page a changé d'adresse depuis. Contrairement au Temps, elle ne se retrouve pas au détour d'une madeleine.

ALT a wavy seashore

ALT I arrived by word of mouth. I was serious and skint, and my morals were lax. I was late. I refused to know my place. I fell into a line of work. I stole and I worked, both. I stayed or moved on accordingly. I got by. I described what I saw. I wrote it down or didn't.I was hungry.I read all the books.I tended toward water, sleeping near water.Everybody's loyal to something. I was loyal to her disappearance. I was loyal to her heresy. I was loyal to the illegitimacy of time, her scattered documents. I thought there could be a space in the world for my descriptions, a space the size and shape the descriptions would come to occupy, like a living body contains lusts, like a room contains sleep, like archives.This thought, the thought of the future space of the thriving, would guide my efforts.I would do the research and write her book.The book of the work beneath the work, the shadow work, the inexistent landscape of women's labour. I would take what I needed.This is for her, not about her.

ALT It was in this state of abandonment that she allowed herself to be carried along by the feeling of duration. Gently, her fingers drew together, her steps left her and she slipped into a pure water where, from one instant to the next, crossing eternal cur-rents, she seemed to pass from life to death, and worse, from death to life, in a tormented dream which was already absorbed in a peaceful dream. Then suddenly with the noise of a tempest she entered into a solitude made of the suppression of all space, and, torn violently by the call of the hours, she unveiled herself. It was as if she were in a green valley where, invited to be the personal rhythm, the impersonal cadence of all things, she was becoming with her age and her youth, the age, the old age, of others. First she climbed down into the depths of a day totally foreign to human days, and, full of seriousness, entering into the intimacy of pure things, then rising up toward sovereign time, drowned among the stars and the spheres

ALT “She was again becoming herself.” —Thomas the Obscure

ALT Stack of books: Riverwork by Lisa Robertson, Blue Eyes Black Hair by Marguerite Duras, The Impossible by Georges Bataille, Thomas the Obscure by Maurice Blanchot

ALT the sea at sundown

ALT I arrived by word of mouth. I was serious and skint, and my morals were lax. I was late. I refused to know my place. I fell into a line of work. I stole and I worked, both. I stayed or moved on accordingly. I got by. I described what I saw. I wrote it down or didn't. I was hungry. I read all the books. I tended toward water, sleeping near water. Everybody's loyal to something.I was loyal to her disappearance.I was loyal to her heresy.I was loyal to the illegitimacy of time, her scattered documents.I thought there could be a space in the world for my descriptions, a space the size and shape the descriptions would come to occupy, like a living body contains lusts, like a room contains sleep, like archives.This thought, the thought of the future space of the thriving, would guide my efforts.I would do the research and write her book.The book of the work beneath the work, the shadow work, the inexistent landscape of women's labour. I would take what I needed.This is for her, not about her.

ALT I have the sense that my person - my body, my memory, my voice, my face, my emotions and reflexes and gestures - awkwardly contains everybody else I have ever known or read about, everybody I've touched and kissed, everybody I've listened to, as well as everybody who came before me. My body is their expressive document. They are waiting for me, Lucy Frost, to do something. There is a feeling in me of not much time. My body persists, my old vain body with its nightly symptoms and random asymmetry, the survivals and escapes that compose my flesh and my voice and its roughening grain. Now I notice something new. When I lean back to query the accuracy of my prepositions, I hold my pen aloft in precisely the way my junk-jewelled great-aunt once held her cigarette in a snapshot taken in 1942. (Page 155)

ALT Why have I spent a whole summer trying to destroy myself in intoxication or to intensify my feelings in intoxication? —Only to avoid becoming aware that I am an abandoned instrument upon which someone, a long time ago, struck a few notes on which I helplessly produce variations, out of which I try furiously to make a piece of sound that bears my handwriting. My handwriting! As if it were important for something to bear my handwriting! Flashes of lightning have passed through trees and split them. Madness has come upon men and inwardly broken them in pieces. Swarms of locusts have descended upon the fields and left the trail of their devouring. Floods have devastated hills and torrents the mountainsides. Earthquakes have not ceased. These are handwritings, the only ones.

ALT black and white cat sleeping on ruins of the ancient Callatis settlement

ALT a stormy day at the beach with rough waves and dark skies

ALT Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork against the backdrop of the sea

ALT the black sea

ALT Blue Eyes, Black Hair. Marguerite Duras. Translated by Barbara Bray.

ALT “Their love is a memory.”

ALT “But for Claude Ridder, the past becomes the present.”

ALT “Over the minutes and seconds that he actually lived,”

ALT “he will free fall from one moment to another.”

ALT seagulls above the black sea

ALT I love you more than all that has been thought and can be thought. I give my soul to you. Henriette Vogel to Heinrich von Kleist Epigraph to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Love

ALT I am giving her the light summer evening soft beauty—over her I pour the splendor of the vanishing sun —over her hair—over her face over her white dress—shimmering gold— I am placing her against the booming blue of the sea—with the shore’s bending snake-like lines— In this manner she is leaving him —who still comprehends nothing

ALT but as in dreams feels her drawing away —He is standing amidst blood red flowers—in the deep blue clouds of evening— He does not understand exactly what is going on— But even when she has disappeared over the sea he feels how a few fine threads of her hair are still fast in his heart—it bleeds—and burns like an everlasting open sore The private journals of Edvard Munch: we are flames which pour out of the earth. translator J. Gill Holland

ALT those who live for themselves alone seems more and more alien to me. Today I know how little I am myself, how much of me is in the universal breath of the spirit. But having attained this goal, I recognize my own futility. I have scorned time, and now it is running out on me. The things one depends on in the course of a life are grotesque, and it is hard to see how one can guard against them without models. Telling stories to anyone who will hear them s stories, who doesn't know you, who doesn't expect literature. Life as a wandering storyteller would be nice. Someone says the word, and you tell the story. You never stop, day or night, you go blind, you lose the use of your limbs. But your mouth still serves its function, and you speak whatever is in your head. You have no possessions, only an infi-nite, ever-growing number of stories. Nicest of all would be if you could live on words alone and did not even need to eat.

ALT Aphrodite bust statue with silver pendant around her neck

ALT “Time… what is it?” Still frame from Eternity and a Day

ALT Sometimes I imagine how it would be if I could be young and beautiful for you-with this youthful beauty, strength, immediacy, assurance (which I believe I never had). But then I am also grateful that it is not like that. I am almost sure that we had to travel all the long and difficult roads in order to be able to see ourselves the way we now do— can do-will do? There is something almost reassuring in this—my wrinkles under the eyes and all that. I cannot say any more to you now other than that you are very much there-everywhere-in the night when I can't sleep— at dawnearly when hardly anything is awakeduring the day with all the life surrounding me of which you know so little. Ilana The Correspondence of PAUL CELAN & ILANA SHMUELI Translated by Susan H. Gillespie

ALT Today facing life, close to living, to dying, as if before the entrance, the exit, the transition, and now I am not living, I'm not dead, all the paths lead you astray, the nights are unending, they're extending, poor tender, well-intentioned thing, you look around yourself at those who don't know, with the most extreme wisdom and most extreme naivety. With a strange joy in your sorrow. And in the joy the strange bliss of feeling you're entirely against death. Death loves me. And this love, this sweet appalling love in my heart, this is life itself.

ALT What is calling you, poor body, what lifts you, and drags you, what attracts you so late, in those nights, so far into the lands where you are never again truly at home, amid the crowd of lively creatures who recognise you and whom you no longer know, no longer see, you are summoned, you answer sum-monses, you meet people dressed and coloured in presence, in reality costumes; they don't attack you, don't reject you, don't welcome you, don't see you, you aren't there, you should go and pursue your profession, your shadow cannot assert itself, you'll be awaited, it seems, there are buildings, full of halls of science of people of scholarship of seriousness of reading machines and deleting machines, you ought

ALT to be bleeding freely from this, there are chairs and meanings, chumps to chop, tongues to iron, there are bureaucracies, circuses full of believers full of sound and sawdust, in silver prize costumes, there are lecture halls full of heads, of prosecution of rules of laws of rights of predictions of licences of exams of blindness of corridors of signs of doors through which to enter and leave without scream-ing, without collapsing thunderstruck, without bleeding without stopping without appearing to crumble away, to widen, without even wobbling, of queues of beings with which you have no relationship at all. Or rather with which you are in an incomprehensible relationship; of incomprehension. You go no further.

ALT We write in order to deny (nier) the nothing (rien) that is God. Again, to write means "to wait for words that wake our thoughts as they write us."

ALT I DIED ON THE TWELFTH of September, at the height of happiness. Clothed in the shadow of the chestnut tree outside the house, my body preserved the posture of a living woman hours after my last breath. Whereas at first I struggled with snakes under my tongue, around my ankles and my wrists, snakes clotting the blood under the skin of my lips and rearranging my limbs to fit the encasement of this new reality, I now watch lavender clouds pass by. A book slides gently from my ashen hand and as it falls on the grass lets out a sound much like how I have always imagined collapsing into the soul of another in the absence of touch might sound. A tender breeze instructs the memory of my fingers on how to manipulate time: as if its seconds were the puppets and my fingers the puppeteers. (…)

ALT Against the background of rotting flesh, existence carries out its sacred rituals unscathed by lingering funereal har-monies. Aware of the impossibility of touch, I resume my count with the dull and inaccessible gaze of someone whose history I wish to forget. The ghost of thought falls captive to the absence of a voice, and as the rain pours down to wash me, a thick darkness invades my mind, penetrating its every corner—a darkness that uproots and relocates shards of memory as if it were repositioning the hours on the clock in the image of a time that only goes backward. A new uneasiness arises. The color of water has settled on the inside of my eyelids. Imagine floating in the middle of a sea. There is nothing but sea all around you, the blue sky itself is a mere extension of this sea. (…)

ALT Here, where thought floats in the middle of the sea under my eyelids, I find myself unable to argue that space is a priori intuition, not based on its infiniteness, for I myself cannot think of infinite space nor can I envision infinite worlds in which the darkness that falls over my lifeless body does so for any other reason than to erase all connections with the past, and I think of how at the heart of the idea of eternal return lies one of the most rudimentary forms of human thought: analogy. The most common expression of this idea is the cyclic return: one world describing a cycle of events disappears and another is born describing the same cycle—I believe it was Goethe who ascribed to this thought the shape of the spiral. Things repeat themselves but they describe an ascent, therefore although one encounters sameness, it will always be on different planes. (…)

ALT I fall to my knees in the rain and find myself loathing its wetness. I loathe the dirt that infiltrates my stockings and mends my skin; the dirt that makes me undress of its memory. On the ground, under the burden of water that falls both here and there at the same time and with the same infectious rage, striving to provide myself not with an answer but with a reading of what collapsed me, I think of the reality of consciousness and how, in itself, consciousness is felt, not known, for it is the organ that knows but cannot know itself, same as the eye sees but cannot see it-self. It is felt, not in the ordinary sense of the word -and not with the senses themselves. (…)

ALT She who did not want— To renounce her peace; the happiness of finally having become the desert, the contentment of a dune in the sun; the triumph of renunciation; did not want to renounce renounc-ing; at the moment in which she had just made solitude her fiancée; to renounce the endless, barely rippled, bright, dry happiness of not being unhappy. All she did not want to do, with good reason, with every reason and no madness at all, everything she had learned from having soared and having crashed, from being broken and getting back up and soaring again.

ALT Four o’clock. Darkest night. —India Song (1975)

ALT Again and again, Edmond Jabès repeats: The writer is nobody. The writer is a shadow. A writer knows only that he writes. A writer commits suicide at the threshold of the book. More than that: the writer is written. "You are the one who writes and is written."

ALT So the ghost is enclosed in a crypt, which is our body

ALT where time lingers in the crumbling of stones and memory seeps through broken arches the ruins of Eldena stretch not as remnants but as openings into something vaster than history for what is a ruin if not a form of remembering that refuses to solidify a slow collapse into stillness where the sacred no longer resides in structure but in air in light in moss covered silence here Friedrich finds not decay but the echo of devotion emptied out and made pure made bare and how curious that what once held walls now holds sky you once said how curious that in this reversal the divine does not descend it rises from the earth in soft defiance of permanence a theology of erosion where beauty is neither whole nor broken but endlessly returning in new forms the ruin does not mourn the past it breathes with it and perhaps this breath this quiet exhale beneath the weight of centuries is all that remains and all that was ever needed perhaps desire is nothing but this

ALT I give this book to those women who seek dead years in the lamp at night. Who stare into their days, transfixed, as into a light. Who know Resignation from the romances and Sorrow from the ballads. Who are ever Strangers among men.

ALT Back into the room you go again. She is there, sleeping, abandoned in her own darkness, her magnificence. You realize she's so made that it's as if at any moment, at her own whim, her body could cease to live, could just thin out around her and disappear from sight, and that it's in this threat that she sleeps, exposes herself to your view. That it's in the risk she runs, with the sea so close and empty and black still, that she sleeps.

ALT The Malady of Death, Marguerite Duras

ALT Our Hands in the Water We stir the water. Our hands seek each other, Sometimes they touch, broken forms. Deeper down, a current: some of the invisible, Other trees, other lights, other dreams. And see, there are even other colours. Refraction transfigures the red. Was it a summer day, no, this is the storm That will 'change the sky, until evening. We thrust our hands into language, They took some words we didn't know What to do with, being only our desires. We grew old. This water, our hope. Others will know how to look deeper For a new sky, a new earth. translation Berverly Bie Brahic