DOUBLE LOCATION

Have you noticed how the form of address has intensified in the material weight of the referent? This is the outcome of intimacy, produced (seduced?) by proximity. The tonal gradations might include mineral water, or the local sunflower oil for the onions and garlic. How that form is called person according to grammars, and can remain abstract for the one writing, like a postulate. Certainly you would agree that it is not scientific to write you into each morning's text, fostering the illusion that you might actually be depicted wherever it is that writing occupies, space or screen or temporal threshold, the line where two languages meet. You said, you have said, yesterday, Marina took her life on her birthday, September 26, 1941, at the age of 43. The lives of the poets. Collobert's 38th birthday, calculating the size of Paris flats, one small room, so one goes to sleep with the gas on. Which detail do you prefer from the death of the poet in San Francisco? The chicken-salad sandwich or the accosted doctor? "My vocabulary did this to me." (I forgot to mention the second line of the famous last words to the friend who accosted the doctor). Why did he not say, Your love will permit you to continue? Do you remember, this morning, the lines, "Often I am permitted to return to a meadow, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is?" Once there was a woman reading from a book of poems. "I only wish that Robert were here." (The one that has been cited in the Soviet period). Once there were two boys who interviewed the one that was cited in the Soviet period. "There was murder in your eyes." As though every glance, every word spoken and intimated, is subjected to a process subjectifying the time we are in another's presence. The chronicle of such interiority cannot be anything other than poetry.

Chronicles omit details. They are not involuntary. After a while, after more than a little while, poets begin to look for this in their own and others' writings, the sign or trace of the involuntary, the trauma, and spasm that returns the trauma. Surfaced, the evidence of pain, severe pain. More than pain, as that word is no longer enough. We want the proof of affliction, Blake's marks of woe. Dante's dark lake of the heart, which figure also arrived, yesterday, among the distinction between manifest and latent, Lacan, cries of pain or desire, this difference between surface and depth, the body of water, what we are permitted to see and what can be seen from time to time in a stray word or gesture. The light on the surface of the water only illuminates reflections. The opacity, beyond where the light reaches, when we know we are in the dark. You leave at nightfall. The four tramps around the fire in the field, in this century they are Homer, Hesiod, Ovid and Lucan. There are no more robes, only a sweater if you are careful and live carefully and care, as you care, for yourself. To care for yourself only, that is sanity. The cup with a little cold coffee remaining that you raise to see if there is, still, some, and spill on your bare arm, and I permit the detail of my tongue on your arm, tasting coffee. That is enough for now, for the writing, the one voluntary item narrating proximity during the late afternoon and early evening.

The poem is an instrument for disarticulating its author. That is what we read for in the West. These are policies, orthodoxies enforced by the institutions regulating the narration of historical structures and legitimating the production of the poetic sign: the one writing cannot know what they are writing, as though the one writing were something sick, or stricken. The one writing must capitulate to the authority of the sign system, where every breath and breath-stop is a symptom. The poetic develops only by ruptures, and abandonments locate intensities. There are more laws, though I am slowly forgetting them. They sound far away at the moment, and I am writing in this moment between the East and West windows, that moment that arrives unannounced, whether involuntary or induced, where the identity construction invoked by my first person is torn into the time of the terrifying cry. For a little while, such outbursts appear sincere, and then they begin to formulate a method as false as any other. That direction aware of the path that it is taking. This reminds one more law: the one that is writing must be lost. The force of the original expression was selva oscura, about the same time as that summer season, when soft was the sun.