From Vestiges_06: Aporia
“I speak, and from then on I am—the being in me is—outside myself and in myself.”
—Bataille
“I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.”
—Beckett
I TO YOU: Pédaler dans la semoule. To wade, to lose means, to lose the thread of our words. My feet pace, march in place, tap to torrents on the treadle. There is no limb that moves in revolution. Assimilating the hands that kneaded the sauerkraut and cancoillotte. I needed, have need of you. In wait, what trodden. Who hasn’t been tempted to put their hand inside a spinning spoke?YOU TO I: In exile, Ovid sends his last book, the Tristia, to a place he cannot return. He speaks to it with what it speaks without him, his overwhelming sadness at not being heard. “Go, my book, and in my name greet the loved places: I will tread them at least with what foot I may.” Only absence responds. What he means he does not speak: the metrical foot of a poem. Samuel Rosenstock, you might know, changed his name to meet his own sadness, to keep it everywhere with him. The sad king in the country not his, who reigned spiritual malaise, legitimized by a ministry of the interior.I TO YOU [neither of us listening]: There are no hints of protest on the Rhein. “At public executions we expect beauty,” A. said. Above us, silhouettes performed jumping jacks through a window. Any expectation of beauty only diminishes it. The expectation of death only wrests it from being beautiful. I detect laughter nearby I could not join, and withdraw my dissent. I’m feeling terribly out of place here.YOU TO I [lost to our own thoughts]: Writing only exceeds in its desire and inability to exceed itself. Kristeva says the space of a foreigner is made of his aloofness, that his time is “a resurrection that remembers death and what happens before” but “misses the glory of being beyond.” Where’s Buber at?I TO MYSELF: A barge glides my gaze and we become neutral to one another. I pluck your words from the air, loving what they don’t mean to me. I give a pinch of tobacco to a man passing by who wants to smoke some hash. We understand what goodbye is as we go our separate ways. Meanwhile C. pursues neo-Nazis through the cemetery on a broken foot. A., still proud of his words, turns the rough draft of a poem into a two-dimensional table. Who even are you?TOGETHER [in confusion]: I’m alive to lapses: lapse of, lapse into.—Jared Daniel Fagen
July 2022
Mainz, Germany