Abandoned Fragment: Galatea

Abandoned draft of an aborted novel, Galatea, that was begun in late 2004 and worked on until the winter of 2005-06, when I concluded that the text evaded rather than transfigured the central questions of the Novel as a discipline. This decision was supported by the feeling that the prose style lacked precision in a way that would have required extensive re-writing. Though abandoned as 'a' work, the process of conceptualising and writing the text was truly alchemical, and I value it as a relic of a period of dissolutio (from just before I moved to Dartington, to several months into my time there) that profoundly moulded my relationship to language and to writing on every level, from the philosophical to the physiological. The trajectory of questioning and engagement that was begun with this text next took form in The Yellow Sign, a text which continues to see periodical revisitation and writing but which may or may not be published(it is, however, often alluded to in my published work), and finally reached a more rigorous stage in The Ecstatic Nerve.

Novels are fucking hard to write.

This attempt was to treat the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in very Symbolist fashion (the Lautréamont & Mallarmé is a bit thick even for me and, needless to say, not worthy of either), through a thousand distorting conceptual and rhetorical lenses and hopefully having inverted the misogyny inherent in the story's usual forms (note the bit satirizing Mallarmé's and Moreau's treatments of the Hérodiade myth). Galatea is reconceived as an avatar of writing rather a sculpture (though an expanded, Post-Structuralist understanding of writing), and the form is essentially epistolary. It reached a bit over 8,000 words; it was not being written sequentially, so in most cases there would have been additional sections or 'letters' inserted between the ones in the draft, which have developed a more (relatively) focused dialogue and obliquely implied narrative than is evident here, where at this stage it all seems rather stream-of-consciousness (it's not, though it does incorporate elements derived from automatic writing and then woven into the rest of the text, sometimes solely through the implantation of certain words or phonetic sounds into the text surrounding the more obviously disjunct passages).

Galatea

Love of art is the greatest love of all

-Francis Picabia

I had wanted to write you, my dear, for at least as long as you have been written; and a text is a kind of eternity, for it (you) swallow/s up all pasts and all futures, endlessly destroying them, a constant present that churns with potentiality. And this, as you have whispered to me in the dark nights, is as close as we can come to eternity, unless we throw all of our faith in the letters of that word itself. And in this way I can say that I have always loved you, will always love you, and love you endlessly; but these words can be turned aside; and so I can say, equally, that I have never loved you, will never love you, abhore you like the vacuum that you are and are not. It is nothing to you- I say nothing in you. I leave you gently and freely to exist as you are, and yet I engage you with the utmost fixation and unfixity; and this, it might be said (though it might not), is itself a species love. 

I was once outside the text, and am, and am not, and will be again, and am forever lost. In that place outside, from whence I issue, this jagged edge of me that juts adventurously into this sprawling house of language in which you and I (that jagged edge) reside, I sat with my ribs clenched tight in the fists of my thought. My forehead was squeezed lovingly in a crowd of letters, but the rest of me hovered like a transparent umbrella in the thin and whistling air. Shimmering clicks rebounded against the far walls, long cords of tarantula legs hummed their lengths perniciously between myself and a shadow blazed into a wheeled concrete grave that rolled to and fro with me whenever I stepped outside this iron door. 

I have said, and will again, that all is simultaneous in you, my dear, the text. And thus it was that I found you beautiful while yet you were completely unconceived (and now, of course, you are growing still, as I type this; but at that “time” you were not yet begun; though, to demonstrate what we have both discovered, that past when you were not, is now imbedded in the you-that-is, and so within the logic of the text itself- and it is the text that we inhabit, or doubly are, [I might say triply are, if we are read, during this moment, the eternal moment that is] that past is now present, that is, presented to my memory and typing fingertips, to your structure, my dear, and to the reader that may be, or inevitably is, scanning us now). I gazed entranced into this non-idea that you were, this shapeless void with the promise of intricate shapings. And the legs of the spiders contorted with clatters, the concrete grave flung against a far wall in a far wing of this endless house, knocking a bust of Dante to the floor. 

There were shadows kissing shadows in this place at that time. My eyes were glued shut with the honey from the sun, and I was drawn into an aery perambulator, was shot along a river of nodes, and I found you smiling in my flesh. I bent my chest in the tower of this mansion with its numberless rooms, the catacombs below digging into the soil like roots of dying. (It is whispered that there are corridors of mirrors there, and worlds made of straw, and a promise that stalks you, and a lovely ghost who shelters you from the jeers of mighty Jove.) In the next room, I heard an electron, abuzz with the sun, humming the typewriter cadenza from Satie’s Parade. Above it, I also heard the booming of a flake of my home, reciting the psalms of Hugo Ball. You know, my dear, because it is the constitution of you, how my brain tends to crawl out through my ears, in order to caress the thing that seduces it; and I was caught, tied to a mast and trapped between these rocks of sound and rhythm. And my brain ripped itself in half to follow these sounds, these rhythms, and in the rift as they ripped, I felt you rush through the tissues that wrapped the nerves of my head. 

By what names have I called you forth? and am still calling? and will call long after my death? Yet as I type this I die, have died, my death is a precondition of this missive; and so I love you. This all is sutured tightly together. The word is rooted in the flesh. This fruit is nearing its dreaming in theramin here. I am hiding in leather, and here in the year it is drowning in yearly secretions. Here in the year, wreathingly nearing the red in here, in the year in here, trying to hear in here, in those that are dear. And here, in here, fighting in yearly, were drowning in lowering heat. I am in the red and gyrating lowering heat, in the yearly, in heat. In the upper-side, frowning in lettering here. They are dreaming in your garden of lillies, in the fighting, in dreaming, in nearing and leathery frowns. And nearing in fighting, in typing, a smile in glowing is finicky air. She was there, flowering and shimmered, solid inarticulation of the absent word condensced and yielding only to a point. Small winged mice fluttered around her, harps gestured coyly toward their interior strings, her throatfingers fitted with rings, and here lepidopterous murmers settle on her clavicle, bring marsupial caresses in their satchels, and fling fingerprints daintily at the fritillary significations couched in the carpet; and she sings, a tightened amourous, a language in beguiling movements that stir coyly the air, and this is her skin I speak of, the veins that pulse it subtly.

And didn’t you know, she whispered, when you began this incantation, this peon to the useless word, that the text cannot escape eroticism, that it can be said, (though just as quickly disproven) to be the very constitution of it?  Because I am here, I speak to you as you write me, I am, we are, you feel me as you type, the words that I am are felt in your stretching tendons, the quick attention of your fingers as they dart across the keyboard. You write, and you are not yourself; you are the catalyst of a text- your will is the will of the text. We are inseperable, and yet you die as you enter me, lost and disemenated, you are open, a space of ifinite fields of language, immersed in language yet breathing the Inarticulate (the signpost of Desire), and for an instant the duration of the apprehension of a word, you are loosed from ‘your’ ‘self’ into the vast play of signification! Did you not see these things? Then write. Then love me.

Coy, cruel, how I love you. Bring me my head on a plate. I will watch my tongue form my words. I will see it curl and stretch itself to the shapes of serifs, tremble with undulations in praise of the nonexistant gods who have heralded your birth! I will see myself as you bear me, heavy in the soup of my blood, calling out your name and a million others, severed from myself, borne heavy on the shoulders of one that I love. I will see my mouth form words that I have scarcely heard, I will be a mirror, and watch the first startled gaze of my eyes as I tremble at myself, before this fatal split, this split that gave you to the world, and gave you to my gaze. 

I am dreaming of you, Galatea, and I’m in between here, in the synapse of desire, but in the snow the cello is chewing on your wallet. It is masticating lovingly, a powdered sheen that lapses in the evenings of desire. A letter in the marigolds. A blind fox dancing merrily over swaying fields of iodine, and licking the heels of mindful indulgence here. It is blocking out the sun, a giant and a little one, a climbing out of interest, a tickling under rhythms. I do not know where the light has gone for today, my dear, nor the green leather mind of our fortuitous undoing. It is dreaming, (though this is merely conjecture) of yesterday, minding the shuttles; dreaming in heavily interested mires of purple arches. And that is where the lace is pointing: deep into a nation of smiling straps; and it is drinking from a pool of gyroscopes. This is where we must follow the little slingless nettles, those that end up looping whistles round a dime.

How silently we adore each other, here, under caverns and mounds of soil! Yet it is, nonetheless, a throat that whistles in your wrist.

How young you used to be. And now your eyes grin with steel. And you have learned the dreadful secret: the key is to find the rhythms that govern yous, the faultlines of your thought and of your circulation, delve into the nests of nerves and thorns where they intersect. And here we are, both newly emerged and knotted together, lovingly, in the text.  At last; at last. At first only my ears (and perhaps some other parts as well; the body is so secretive, you never can be sure) knew what I had seen. But they searched, and they made certain alliances with certain parties in my brain, though the natures of these relationships were never made clear.

To feel, to know intimately the depth of the text, to run my fingers through the hairs of each trace, the wispy lines of its passage and trajectory; to feel in my flesh the thumping, whining rhythm of its movements; what is desire but the insistance of the trace, the hypnotic pull of it, into the dissemenated depth of the text? And the text itself- this text- all texts- are endlessly disseminated, systems coupling and splitting like cells of the body, languages interwoven and always turned obliquely away. And the text itself is constitutive of this rhythm, just as in this passage the text itself presents a rhythm, a texture of contractions and expansions of our attention as we feel the pull of the text, the word itself forming a scoliotic spine of the text. Thus we find, notwithstanding various shifts of tone or discourse, the erotic element in the text, now made inevitable by the very neccesity, in a text such as this one, of liberal recourse to the name of the text. This presents us with what one might, from an unwarrantedly pessimistic view, consider a parasitic relationship of the dissemenative aspects inherent to the text, to the supposed intention, which in itself implies a single or, one might say, non-simulaneous view of the workings (or workings-out) of language. Having elsewhere in this text (for the simultaneist text is simply a system of relationships whose arrangement is not consciously or neccessarily temporal, thus making it theoretically, if not practically, impious to admit to such conceptions as “earlier” or “later,” though we must privately admit, my dear {you see how that slipped in} that we have not come close to escaping their tyranny yet; one step at a time, as General Jackson used to say.) and (but let me appologize for these baffling parantheticals- we are both playing coy, aren’t we, my dear?) established critically the recurrence of the name of the text (which I prefer to the intrusion of quotation marks into the text- nationalistic, jingoistic marks which I employ only in the polemic, never what one might erroneously call the somewhat more strictly poetic works; or in any event, not from now on, from the moment I type this. And yet, you will notice how I have just contradicted myself, by bringing into focus the play of time upon my productions. But contradiction is a neccessity of the play of the text, including the texts of our bodies and our languages; for contradiction produces a multiplicty of “selves,” which incidentally is also to say the destruction of the dialectic conception of “selves,” but more importantly is also a simultaneity of “selves” or of the points of perceptual clusters which that concept re-presents. And these recurrent parentheses, which are echoed in the telescoping clauses of the prose in general, will not be a constant presence in the text of you, my dear; but they will and possibly have recurred, and thus represent a microcosm of the “real” topic of the text. And furthermore {speaking still of the parentheses} we can see in them a revelation of the tendancy of text to draw us away, seducing us, seducing me, my dear, through your warm skin of vanishing traces; that is, to draw us away from any single “purpose” of the text. Yet, before ending this parenthesis, I should mention that this does not imply a rigourous or pedantically fatalist conception of the workings of language [of you, my dear,] or our relationship with it, but rather it is “intended” to imply {though the idea of “intention” in such a text as you/rs, my dear, can be nothing inherently but an idea lovingly cared for and arranged among others for the service of poetry; or else, if one holds to the “intention” of the text for whatever sentimental or other reasons that might be advanced, as an “irony” artfully placed, in the misconception that anything but irony existed anywhere else and that the topic was thus worth discussing in any but a technical discourse} an embodiment of the glow of language, which is sumultaneously us, the catalyst for us, and athenian offspring from us {like you, my dear}.The texts of our various movements and sparks are not dialectic and cannot admit of either destiny or cultural immunity) the very name of the text is, from the moment a reader apprehends the system, employed irrevocably as a linguistico-sexual system (if one will excuse a silly neologism), a rhythm worked innegotiably into the flesh of the text.  One might easily identify many other such semantic, rhetorical, poetic, grammatic, and phonetic examples enmeshed with the text.  

It is muttered that deep in the catacombs, if one winds toward the tunnels where General Sherman was killed by a raven, mad for revenge; past the tomb of Baudelaire (you know, my dear, it is only some hack in that tomb there in Paris, the real man’s laid to rest in the catacombs), past the keyhole through which voyeurs endlessly harp on Duchamp’s dream, past the corridor where the air of the catacombs is made of sand, a panther sits daubed in tawdry gold, a wilderness of quills fluttering beneath his paws. This panther draws deep breaths, and each time his ribs expand like furred balloons, I feel myself drawn in, the air rushing madly about my head, slapping noisily into my back; the catacombs themselves become his lungs, and I am sucked irresistably to him, my lung in his lungs, his breath hooked in my nostrils, dragging me closer. And I stood, muscles flicking away imperceptable tensions, and stared in silence at this beast before me, the feathers at his clawed feet tugging faintly in the air. His flanks were matted with tiny hairs, each quivering faintly in the air, millions of yellow follicles sprouting from the ground, glinting and made nearly transparent as the fugitive light struck through them, glanced over them, as they shifted slightly in the movement of air. Here and there, fleas stalked, their shells hunched under the many burdens of their race. The flea would creep forward, cautiously, peering through the bars of follicles around it, alert to the slightest movement, its antenae trembling in tense communication with the air; then slowly, slowly, its confidence returns, a surge of desire fills its insectine nerves, and suddenly it springs into the air, quite rashly and against all natural necessity- it feels the gentle slash of hairs whisk by as it launches from the ground, it hears the whistle of atoms zipping past, and in a sudden burst its multiplicity of eyes is confronted with the sea of follicles, waving slightly in the slight wind, rolling hills of skin stretched across a wilderness of flank. 

And it was this sight that met my eyes also, but frozen in terror, I looked closer: This plantigrade cat was studded with eyes. Its bellychestshoulderlimb was a landscape of seventeen eyes, each one moist with tears, which ran in dark streaks down its coat to puddle on the floor, soaking the feathers there. The lids all flickered furtively, the small veins in the corneas bulged red, rhythmicallyrhythmically, the small crumbs balanced precariously on the lashes like pearls on a cornice.

(Is it not terrible and fantastic to recall, my dear, that all of these things are spread out below us, here, now, far beneath the groaning timbers of this house? That at this moment, now, as you read us, this panther is waiting with its breath and its seventeeen mournful eyes, watching the stirring air, twitching in silent anticipation?)

Yet I have seen it, and see it now, and will forever see it. I have looked into each of its eyes. For I fell to my knees then, and swayed in the air before its face the terror tugged my stomache into chest my lungs collapsed into my mouth wheezing shrilly. Helpless, I felt its warm breath on my breathless face, I felt my teeth wither in horror. And my head fell forward, helpless, I felt the thin tissue of flesh between its skull and its furred skin that beat a pulse against my forehead. Helpless, my hands lifted to caress its blinking sides. Its hairs sprang between my fingertips as they moved, and it did not close its seventeen eyes as my palms passed over them, and the lenses left their sticky film smeared across my skin, I felt them twitch as I pressed against them, their tears ran warm down my wrists and arms. And I wept, my forehead pressed against the forehead of the beast, caressing its warm flanks and its moist eyes. We wept together.

My dear, my lungs are strewn with your letters. And though my breaths have been shallow in these constricted spaces, these spaces without walls where all is rendered banal and subjected to a thousand glowering eyes, nonetheless I breathe you as you me, you see, a minute space where we are momentarily confused, the text and I, you, me, and it, and there it is again, you and I, and this is what we wait for, is it not? The sleepy space between the signifier and its ghost? And thus between us, dear, we hold the map to these catacombs; however, it is useless, or it would not be a map; or else, these would not be the catacombs.

There are, as you know, a numberless mass of creatures that crouch in the catacombs. There is a forlorn squid who splashes hopelessly from chamber to chamber, dragging its gelatinous body along the floor, leaving behind it a trail of secretion, like a leper dripping saliva from its pores. Its tentacular strangles of heaves and its sweat of salty mud are continuously replaying those lost years shrouded in yellow smoke, when we could not breathe each other, when the lenses of our eyes were clouded with the steam of our separate breaths. These were the years (and have they ended? and did they begin? and are they surrounding us now, at this moment, as we read?) when millenial prophesies were endlessly repeated by the various inhabitants of this house, and moreover the denizens of the catacombs; for there were many dire signs. This was the year that pacifiers rained from the sun, when a stallion was discovered whimpering alone in the hoarfrost, when fantastic prayers mounted to the heavens only to turn to whips and cutlasses, and topple again to the earth. It was the year that an army of gaseus fish was rumoured to roam the lower passages, singing a novena for the cataclysmic demise of the Rotting Bull. The lips of the earth stuttered terrible things, and small children gouged out their eyes in agonized denial, spurning the temptations of their playmates.

And then: nothing. Once again the planets smirked and whirled away, the darkness returned to the catacombs, the house above creaked and sighed. And now I am wondering whether drowning is a lollipop; it is certainly less horrible than a candle wringing its own neck. This, my dear, is a horrible sight: the waxen knuckles tightening, pressing into the waxen throat, the thin gurgle, the waxen tears mingling with the waxen blood released in a sudden drip, a rush from the gaping mouth; the spurtstruggle of the flame as it gasps and darts wildly into the air like a swimmer waving above the tide that drinks him fatally. The slow sinking onto waxen knees, the melting into the waxen puddle, the spurt, the choke, the running tearwaxblood, and all the time the stuttered flame and why and why and why. 

Orgasmic, the text and intertwined flesh. The thing, you see, is to locate the locus, the very space of rift itself; the hole through which the notion of lack, of rift, of the possibility of seperation or otherness emerged in the mode of existence which it created itself. It is not only the textual womb, but the womb of the species; and if, my dear, you will play along with me as I draw this out, the womb not merely of our species, but of the very notion: species. (You will notice, my dear, for your inky fingers are sensitive, that this is not an entirely careless figure of speech; for it implies not only, as I will discuss after the end of this parenthesis, that the scientific concept designated by the word: species, is itself ostensibly our own “creation” in the same way as is the word itself; it also implies that the very mental process of “specification,” of division, classification, is likewise a linguistic construct; yet it is also the very modus operandi of language itself; which brings us, in a different way yet stemming from the same metaphor, to the same point, that of aporia, the notion of identification or “birth,” and the concept of the rift.) Thus, to find the space of rift, to find the space that enacts the aporia through which the idea of the Other emerges (whether the Other who exists, or the other-than-what-is, the very concept of signification), is to lay hold to the defining concept of language, and of us, my dear. And Desire itself contains the concept of the rupture, of the potential-to-be-other, the possibility of a lack or refusal of satisfaction, which is encoded as a necessary condition for Desire, which forms its very terms. (This is why the text, in the end, must always be erotic; because it is a text, it is a network of lacks and refusals.) And here we have been pointed toward the space of the rift; must it not be, my dear, the space of the severing of language from phenomonological experience, of the text from the flesh? For at this point the notion of signification creates its own condition; as soon as the notion of seperation exists, but also not until then, the “mind” (which is in fact to say, the founding notion of, or recourse to, identification and seperation or otherness as a mental process) does in fact become in one sense (I do not intend here to imply any mystical, intervening force outside the play of language) “separate” from the “physical”, which is to say, more or less non-linguistic or prelinguistic (“physical” is better seen as a descriptive and qualitatively and quantitatively variable concept than as a simple or rigorous distinction); while the one is still dependant upon the biological systems of the other, they become subject to different modes of perception, structure and operation. And so, my dear, you see how well I have learned and given flesh to your teachings! I have cupped your simultaneous hearts in my hand, the blood in the veins, the lovely dark, the space in you, the words shuffling between thoughts. And here I will stay until tendons wrinkle in the sun; cradling you in this space in you, the lovely paradox, this sustaining space of grammatical romance, this space that is not space, and so which can harbour anything. Each word I whisper to you is performative; and it is in this way, by striking out against the exclusion of language itself as a space for identification in the sense of a supposed marking-off of a “subject,” at least when dealing within language in its narrow sense- that is, in writing narrowly defined- that we prove disprove in another, less logical, and yet, paradoxically, performative way, the very concept of the performative which you and I, my dear, have just activated in this text. For every word you write is what I am, and yet I do not speak through you, for every word that forms me springs full-blooded from the air or our single head, like Athena, or like me, my dear, when you asked a favour from the gods and then bestowed it upon yourself; and this is because each word you type or read is loosed from you completely, you are, as has been said and will be said again, always already of course, disseminated as your letters drop into my lap and my lips. And the reader, who is also you, at least in part (surely, for within this text, of course, youyou share the same name) will note that in the course of this discourse (whose boundaries are only definable insomuch as we can identify certain rhetorical shifts and patterns or areas of relative consistancy, the borders and even bodies of which are in fact nonetheless far from secure) the implied speaker switched almost imperceptably from the first person to the second; but this, of course, is no mystery my dear, because now, this moment, we are intertwined, as the words float for a moment in the space between utterance and textuality, this is our time together; and though I blush to mention it, there are two yous, and while you, my dear, are here with me, you, too, are implicated. If the text is always in some sense autonomous, the reader is always, in some sense, voyeur. Have I made you uncomfortable? Language is no comfortable thing; but that is why I love you; and there, you see, we have done it again; we are floating.

And hence this catacomb of nerves that are not nerves; hence the danger that is not dread, the threat that beckons welcome. You and I, my dear, have nothing to get lost in but yourselves; and this is dangerous indeed. Let us play awhile beneath the stalactite of this paragraph, we will sing together merrily as we drift into this tunnel of discontent. 

I know only one thing: the idea of the rupture exists.

And peering at you through the window, the beauty of your letters glowing in the sun, I thought that the most startling thing had been that Aphrodite (who, as we all know, is wont to be accompanied by a team of sixteen winged spaniels to whisk her glossingly through the air) in fact stepped out of my ear in order to divulge to me a secret. It had become inevitable that I should turn her away with shouts and angry incantations; I trust the work of no god.   

And in this, my dear, I am of course like you, who have, in your various twistings of who you are, so many reasons to glare darkling at the gnawing of that word: god. I apologize; let the word sink slowly, like oil, into the gurgling floor of this crypt, where we have stopped only to take a few deep breaths before pressing on into this inky cavern, searching stalwartly for a goal. This word shall not paw out from between my lips for many paragraphs hence, unless accompanied by wild and terrible exhortations against it; and in the meantime, let your ears heal, and steel themselves. We have conversed already, or will, or already are, about that word: about the idea, the chain, that it drags with it, behind it, in its endless and pitiless wanderings through the chambers of this heart of subterranian stone. We have discussed, or will, between us, the bile of that word, the chains which it drags so proudly behind it, and with it. We have mourned, or will, the many languages it has killed, has strangled, with these chains it carries murderously with it, behind it. We have cursed it, or will, that word, that Polluter of Languages, and the chains of strangulation that it drags with it, upon it. 

Yet this is only one register on which your hatred seethes through the skiens of heather for this word, for the Dead Trope; and it is only one sense of the word in which your hatred seethes. For I have, or will, already expanded upon the impossibility of your remaining single to me, that is, a single text, distinct completely from any others; and the state, of course, is reciprocal. For you too, Galatea, are not only a flight of words clattering through the skies of a glowing page, but also a dark hunk of metal bobbing on a balmy sea, belching gusts of death that shed their rust above the fishes; and you also are a sprite loved sparingly by another, and yet by another. Three eyes foam wherever you flicker, even if mine are turned for a moment away. You are, must be, always already have been Polysemic, and this is one secret of your surgically traced steps, and the nets that shoot lightly from your wrists. And in this other life, far from the catacombs, happily ensconced atop a furore kicked repeatedly through a fallow sea of boots, you were loved by three eyes and by two bodies and by a million minds. But one single eye, Galatea, as you know, is never content with its lonely corneal visions, and may be a portal to the other sense of this word you so despise, and which I must not mention for a number of paragraphs yet; for through this fallopian canal of lightshot images, only one of you can be seen. A single flop a lid and you disappear; the blind between the dark and the oracular is sliced, removed; there is no jumping from one side to the other of the peripheral flash of nose, there is no flickering of your flesh; merely in, and out like light despised. And this is the razor-line where jealosy grows, and then flesh slice and rip in mighty rage spill interest the ground might cracked, with insolent in isn’t in, in please and do not everything and riptearchew and spilled and coursing end into the waves the blood. And oneandoneandone, and there I was mourning, only one of me and only, and the shadow standing hulk and over me, darkening, grass curl in blighting and scent of bubbling, and the hulking shadowed over me, and I knew sang and though in water vanished was as a corpse and never one alone and was. And the blood drained from me, I was white as milk. And the flexing dripped from my fingers, and I was stonecracked. And the roundness ran from my dark and mouthing gape, and I was flat. And the molecules, aghast at my lament, were whisked away in terror, and I was nothing at all but light. And I felt a loving serif turning a key in my tongue of glowing, and I was a jutting of you, and enveloping you. And I was and am.

And now, because I am me (though also you) I will utter what you (though also me) have promised not to; for Polyphemus was a kind of minor god, as all are minor in the end, and petty, killing small thoughts with their small laws. And his failure, his evil, like all those of his race, was this: he lived with one eye open.

You know, my dear, that there were others before you, will be others after you, are others simultaneous with you; that is to say, of course, other writings, other texts, other networks of denials. And has been noted already, or will, this state is reciprocal, and lovely. But as you bloom continually into everything, opening yourself with a swallowing motion, relations tracing off into the distance, beyond it, becoming, in fact, (as has been mentioned already in this text, or will be, or both) a particular structure of everynothing, these others that were and are and shall be, are in fact tangled with you, to use a favourite metaphor of this text-of-you, my dear; or, to put it more aptly (I had at first, by some slip, typed ‘amply,’ but quickly caught and rectified this slip), they are latent in you (for what is not?) and so surely you posses some mysterious ancestral knowledge of these works, your fellow-texts; surely you feel the thrill and rumble of devious and catastrophic conflagrations, though they happen many genres away, beyond possibilty of your direct apprehension; surely you are gnawed by hideous guilts whose origins are utterly unknown to the letters and phrases of your text waving and swaying on the surface of the ocean of you; surely you know in unknowable ways the joys of the words of you thrown off in wild throes of other passionate and joyous texts. And so, surely (if the word is repeated enough, then surely, it becomes fact; all facts in you, my dear, are rhetorical and exquisitely voluptuous, sinuous in patient diversions and delays) you must know of the many texts that play with my many names; and surely this must include (for they are clustered thick on the nucleotides of your sentances my dear) the works of polemic, the irresponsible cries to war, the subtle dances around the radii of texts and of my many notions of them, the criticisms, the long-winded and self-defeating theories; these things must crouch in your marrow; and in this, you are like some others, whose typefaces are encased in flesh. And some (though most surely not you, my dear) may take these things: theoretical works polemic or otherwise, manifestos, criticisms in both responsive and prescriptive senses, relating to specific works, bodies of work, or otherwise, and to either “my” “own” works or otherwise; to be “intended”, at least, even if this supposed intention is inevitably doomed to failure by the very terms in which it is not only forced to operate but from which it is born, to lay out, even if only in some obscured and shadowy sense, a coherent platform for interpretation, at least in a broad sense of the term; That is to say, that the body of work that an artist has written concerning his/her own work- the themes, devices, tropes, and sets of intertextual references that the artist has laid out in such a body of work- should in some sense attempt a kind of comprehensiveness, at least insofar as it is possible to do so, to the limits of the artist’s own insight into the workings of their creation of the text. This, my dear, is not so; denials and evasions are central to the workings of language, that is you, my dear; and silences and evasions can be carefully placed, by the artist as well as the text itself.

But all of these deployments are subject to the riotous machinations of the ghosts that inhabit the realm where text and subject become shadowy and meet. And which level of these catacombs is the stage for this machinery, nobody can say; for there is no ceiling and no floor, and the walls arch like epileptic onions. It is a place where nouns implode, where we are swept savagely along in tunnels that mangle relishing the rushing, in the streaming, in the slightly downcast into netting webs, and then the stuttering, the pens that laugh at muttering, and slipping wry away are lost in wailing and in ecsacy. It is here that you were bathed in enchanted water, Galatea, dangling like a lovely fish above the pool of rushing. A single caliper pricked the space above your wrist, or below it, for there is no floor or ceiling here, in the corridor of glorious siezures. And this caliper was lowered by a wonderous machine devised by 6,268 of the very greatest minds, and thus this caliper, plucking you at the wrist, immersed you lovingly, belching steam, into this pool. And so you were armoured against the rush of atoms that met you in this sprawling mansion here above; and so it is, now, here with you in the catacombs that were your womb, where I am a jutting stranger trembling with turbulent passions and with a kind of joyous terror, that I lightly but magnetically brush your wrist like a talisman, a glowing turning in the dark, a hill from which a plant with fingers grows. 

[FRACTURED SELF-CRITICAL NATURE OF THIS TEXT NOT POSTMODERN, BUT ALIGNED WITH LIFE ITSELF, DARKER, MORE TERRIBLE THAN POST-MODERNISM- REF TO SURREALISM? WITHOUT NAMING POST-MODERNISM OR SURREALISM DIRECTLY. THE MIND OF THE TEXT]

Another name for “God,” especially in the single personified deity of the West, would be: “the reader.” Humanity defines itself and thus gives birth to itself (to the very potential of “itself”) through the idea of the reader, inscribing an identity into us as it moniters our actions. “God” must be the reader of the texts that we are, it is through this, and only through this, that he gains power. But “God” is employed here only as a trope; or perhaps, my dear, I should rather say, as a diseased and amputated limb of a trope. For when the self-reflexiveness, the self-awareness of the trope as trope, is lost, it removes the creative element from humanity and places it within the realm of external power and of a denial of the workings of language. Thus the creative drive itself is turned not into a trope, but into a rotting corpse of a trope; and the fruits wither with the vine, and the creative drive itself, which is fed by its own creations and modes and tropes, withers with it. For all tropes must be self-reflexive, or we move farther away from what we are. A trope which denies the shift of language is dead, because you, my dear, live in shiftings. And this is why we must cry out against “God” the Dead Trope, Polluter of Languages. 

And yet, if we have learned only one thing, my dear, it might (though it might not) be this: even the nonexistent can have ghosts, such as yours, lovingly haunting the nerves of these letters. Each word is possessed of ghosts, or is, perhaps, as will be expanded upon, or has been, elsewhere in this text, itself a breed of ghost; and god is nothing if not a word! And so, as we all know, are the dead. And so the dead-that-never-were have imposing shades indeed, and the ghost of god haunts mercilessly this network of tombs and palaces. 

And you willmaycouldhave noticed elsewhere in this text, my dear, that I have noted the rhythmic repitition of certain words, such as the very word: text; how we might gaze at that word in its subtle shifts, in the markings of time that the word makes- the word sometimes quick and percussive, with a word, any word, of only a short syllable, perhaps, in between, followed by a certain interval of perhaps even a line, before at last, after so long we either forget or cramp in tense waiting, the word marks once again a certain kind of time.

This existing is a very difficult thing; there are so many registers, so many thematic structures that one must reconcile.

I have noticed something strange: the beasts of the earth hate the sounds that my mouth makes, yet will sleep on the sheets where those words are written. What kind of trickery is this? What was the dreadful and prenatal crime, perpetrated by ornigraphic utterings before they coagulated like sedimentary honey in our mouths? What mothers did these words murder in the marzipan back-alleys in the womb of fir-trees? Surely it must have been a dark deed, for now we see the nations of mutterings, the whole race of words driven from every natural hearth into the knifebreath of resonators, the hideous mark blazing upon their brows, trading off their loads of meanings in exchange for a roof over the rented tongues they sleep on for the lonely night, striving in vain to convince ideas to trade their places, in order themselves to leave off wandering and die in peace. But it is vain- like literary conventions yet to be transgressed, ideas are too chaste and lovely to hold commerce with words; a spasm, a gesture at a wall of glance, a tiptoed trail only inches into the gears of night, and a recoil; this is all; this is the sad and cumbersome life of words.

And you, my dear, perhaps you have an intimation of this; why else would you spend hours up each night, away from me, counting the petals of alligators that nuzzle and purr at your ankles as you sit like a cacophonous arch in the middle of the garden, the anthropological cartouche of weeds and flowers that surround this casket of a house? I hear a snap of phonetic twig, breath slight and hesitant to heavy in the nebula of fountains; a shiver convulsing the chilled air, heart beat to the beat, the rhythm sudden and simultaneous, the nearness of breath between two solitary stone abstract, the spark the fear the almost tug and the omniprescent retreat of virgin thought; a spark a spark a spark. Let me be a spark, youareyouare.

Night is a crumple of paper. The rustle. A dark sparking, the lust of the thought for the word. Again I say to you, you who have penetrated this garden of linguistic desire: you knew, you knew what you would find, what the divining of your pen would discover underneath the floorboards and the clausterphobic expanses of the grounds of this mansion, this prison you have built for this extension of you. Just as you knew that it must be your grave, a little death woven into light and paper, every time you visited; so you knew that it was waiting for your waiting, that here the text, this text that spiders through the walltreecurtainfountaincatacombs your brain its nerves electric causeways, this text of all texts could not escape eroticism, could not escape return, that it can be said, (though just as quickly disproven) to be the very constitution of it. For the text, this text, all texts, represent little reachings out for comprehension or for utterence, or else beyond for something looking back, for something tangible that was not tangible, for some proof that we (this word taken individually, as you and I [or as an editorial “we,” which further complicates matters, for this deployment posits a hypothetical, but not “actual” other to confirm the writing of the “I”; yet I am already employing “you,” {meaning of course you, my dear} in much the same way, refering to an absent or hypothetical you {and you are always absent- hence your unassailable beauty} which is only barely active as a characterization as opposed to a bald rhetorical, or perhaps armchair-psychological device; thus the employment of “we” in the first level of parentheses, rather than here at the second register {though we have made several excursions yet deeper into this parenthetical realm, this rhetorical womb, this catacomb, such as, for instance, this, here, now now now} would represent a second register of “we-ness,” perhaps but not neccessarily heierarchical; this possibility might be said to be echoed in the nested or, to choose a more appropriate metaphor, layered structure of this very parenthesis] , or taken to imply the whole of “humanity” however one might wish to define it, or any larger or smaller abstract group with which we might wish to identify our selves) can in fact produce some thing or act in the world. In this sense we can see creation as a kind of talisman like that carried by some fictitious and shuddering man carrying nothing but a spear and the eye of his chosen, which stares back at him. How many times has the text returned to the word, text, the word, and so many other words, and so many others, and also to phrases so beautiful or terrible they haunt our minds like ghosts in the catacombs, intruders from other texts, other minds, other forests, other manors? Return is inherent in iterability itself, as is your little death, my dear, in which you are so happy to join me here among the reptiles.

No doubt, my dear, with your cosmopolitan cells tangled in the air you breathe; and with only somewhat less doubt you, too, our reader, our charming pet voyeur, have noticed the many borrowings from many other texts and many other ideas in this, our text; psychoanalytic forceps tangled in the tissue of dictionaries, semiotic apparatus rasping the text to its lovely bones. (an odd metaphor, you may have noted, an orphan among these pleasant tropes) These borrowings, of course, are both of rhetoric and sense, though where one ends and the other begins is by no means clear. You may also (not you, my dear, but you) assume, since these ideas are so repeated, are flecked so generously over the surface of the text, that I (we) think them original; in which case, no doubt, you seethe, “yes, yes, we’ve all read this or that French author, you’ve nothing to preen yourself about,” and you are, of course, in this attitude I have ascribed to you, this attitude I have written you into, entirely correct. But your eye has been too far from the keyhole (you were distracted looking for the key; there is none; what would be the need?). For this is not the purpose of these passages that I have remarked upon for you, which have occurred and will recur; their purpose is of course a figment, but they might be argued to partake of a love in these languages, their repetition a testament to our throes of joy in them. We keep returning to these themes and stylistics of the merging of the text, the dissemenation of the text, the many paradoxes of the text, the windings and diversions and repetition of the text, the boundlessness and inward-turning of the text, for one reason only, as well as many others- we love the text, and love the love of text. I am no philosopher, my dear, but a lover of the text; and any text that brushes up against me is melted by my joy, and shaped by me into another form of love; I recognize no duty to its untransfigured state. And so these revelations which have become so commonplace are the coy courtship rituals of the text, of this text, they are yet another language by which we gesture familiarly our continuing affection.

And one of these commonplace revelations is this: a word is a certain species of ghost. This can be demonstrated in a dreadful manner in one of the upper catacombs of this heliotropic mansion. One finds there, after sifting through the fens of weeds and algae, littered with pots and pans discarded there by the eunochs of Jove, a hollow place, carved from your own mouth. The corpses of your forefathers, hunchedryellowhite, range tightly about you. Glued heads to their heads, the cadavers of your siblings’ descendants, generations pendulum shaking with the steps of their anscestors, ranged all about you. The cave of your mouth breathes moist all about you, a soft juggling, the roof swelling and swaying elastic rush but not then to kill you. And behind you: the void, sloped and trembling about you. The place where words are born, slip away from their magnets, and squeeze themselves into atoms. (This is the place where you were born. One can take this in a broadly metaphoric sense [broad in several senses of the word] but I mean most especially you, my dear [I can only think that the word: you is the second-most-fitting word in the language for italicisation].) Words gush from this pit, spout joyously into the air, glower like a monk of shame, waft like teakettles into the ears of the nasal passages. The words buffet you and hurl you toward the ring of your familiars, you meet them with a click wet bone ring out and then...

And here my interlocuter broke off, shaking his red-rimmed eyes in slow terror: and nobody can say, then, what happens to you; no one has ever been there, for everyone knows what lies in wait. 

But I have unlocked the very charming secret, what remains to be discovered there: salt fish house fire-hydrant elephant archeopterix, which is to say, my dear, in this tongue we have twined for us, this: you are swallowed.