The word for word is word

The best thing would be to write down events from day to day. Keep a diary to see clearly – let none of the nuances or small happenings escape even though they might seem to mean nothing. And above all, classify them. I must tell how I see this table, the people, my packet of tobacco, since those are the things which are changed. I must determine the exact extent and nature of this change. For instance, here is a cardboard box holding my bottle of ink. I should try to tell how I saw it before and now how… Well, it’s a parallelepiped rectangle, it opens – that’s stupid, there’s nothing I can say about it. This is what I have to avoid: I must not put in strangeness where there is none. I think that is the big danger in keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything. You continually force the truth because you’re always looking for something. *

Observing Sartre’s cahiers. As if they were king-size dried insects, they look imposing, enduring: I could say they look monumental. Once they’ve been human; once: mistakes, rubbed or crossed out words, marginal notes. Now they are steady and still, firm. They’ve been handed over to History, they are – as Sartre himself would say – settled accounts.
Watching my cahiers – piled on the shelves. It makes me feel dizzy. I know they do have a future, their future is not mine; one day, they’ll be still, motionless, swollen with yesterday’s words, those words will be irremediable. Sentences and absolutions, failings, certainties, regrets, remorses, falls into oblivion and omissions. They’ll be “what is left”, not exactly “the best” or “the worst” of me; they’ll simply be – above all, after all – all, or nothing. My diaries contain (my) everything – that’s a sartr-ish nothingness.
A journal can not contain life: a journal sums life up, briefly; with a hasty, haughty, solemn, shabby tone and rhythm, a journal is an obstinate growth of vain details; minutiae. Yesterday I worked on X, I met Y, I read Z; I haven’t written a single line about them all, nor on my Rhodia, nor here. I’ve written and I’m writing about Sartre’s manuscript I found googling in search of calligraphies. It feels like I can not find words for pain, delusion, passion, beauty. I scribble about knick-knacks and I de-scribe chief systems.
Life lies in the middle, unwritten.

My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
…

elle: Wake up. WAKE UP!
me: I wasn’t sleeping at all. Just dreaming.
elle: Dreaming?
me: Dreaming of Luanda. Angola. Neto was a poet.
elle: Are you writing about it?
me: No. Ryszard did it, in 1975.
elle: What are you writing about?
me: A friend has given me a turquoise pen. Stabilo, point 88.
elle: Is that enough?
me: I’m writing about Micheal’s hands. A robotic archangel. On stage, while my fingers were waving and rippling in the opaque air over my head. And his ocean blue feet.
elle: Then?
me: The night after, they wanted me to trade my Triple Gem for a trite genesis.
elle: Who?
me: These two preaching Californian chicks, they had a Mc Cain Will Win t-shirt and a snow-white pit bull sleeping on the marble stairs.
elle: And…?
me: Nothing. A woman fell. Just behind us. Unconscious, sick, or dead. No idea. I took pictures.
elle: Pictures are intoxicating you.
me: Pictures are saving me, feeding me.
elle: In the beginning was the word…
me: So they say. I remember my grandmother singing the old lullaby: Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος…
elle: Words, not images.
me: Images are words.
elle: YOU ARE SCARED OF WORDS.
me: It can be. Don’t shout.
elle: YOU ARE HIDING WORDS BEHIND PICTURES!

+ + +

Elle, a.k.a. Liza or Lizaveta, is 13 years old.

When I’m on the river I see the answer right in front of me. The question is risibly unknown.

Drunkard yes and one of the worst fools on earth – In fact not even genuine drunkard just fool – But I stand there with hand on curtain looking down for Billie, who’s late, Ah me, I remember that frightening thing Milarepa said which is other than those reassuring words of his I remembered in the cabin of sweet lonesome Big Sur: ‘When the various experiences come to light in meditation, do not be proud and anxious to tell other people, else to Goddesses and Mothers you will bring annoyance’, and here I am a perfectly obvious fool American writer doing just that not only for a living (which I was always able to glean anyway from railroad and ship and lifting boards and sacks with humble hands) but because if I don’t write what I actually see happening in this unhappy globe which is rounded by the contours of my deathskull I think I’ll have been sent on earth by poor God for nothing.

Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

That girl, K, I hardly know who she is. She got here, I heard someone mumbling “excess luggage” as she was unpacking. I guess K left California with all her belongings, i.e. Manolo Blahnik shoes and a dozen thick photo albums. Last week she invited me to coffee at her table. She wanted to show me the visual relics. Her puppies (“Barnabas, Tertullian and Delilah”), her mother (having breakfast, playing softball, swimming, with Donald Trump, with Schwarzenegger when he was Mr. Universe, tasting a Caipirissima), her sister (mostly smiling and waving and looking soooo fine), and her wedding pictures, of course. Only five. You know, she said, my ex-husband was already drunk; I already hated him.
I had to recognize him, of course.
He had been my boyfriend, 1988 – 1991.
They got married in 2004, instead, a 17-weeks idyll. I didn’t tell K about him. I just nasalized “how cool is the dress you’ve chosen for the ceremony” – I had to say something. Anything. “Silver and turquoise strapless sheats are my passion”, she declared. I nodded in assent.
A few days after I got an email from K.
Five .jpg files, all hi-res, as an attachment. Those five pics. Drunk ex-boyfriend, a dozen years after, getting hitched with a Californian lady whose beloved dogs are called Barnabas, Tertullian and Delilah.

Now I remember
I was roaming through Scotland
black – the crows
red – the walls, like bleeding.
Now I remember the gentleman
who said I had to cram all of those things
to store them in my brain,
which was a warehouse already;
he said I didn’t need
all those fat/skinny people
all those Somebody People
all those Nobody People.
His face wrinkled in a silent laugh.
Yes I do remember Oslo
the espionage agents and the jack knives;
I do remember the American Night of Lexical Entries,
and I remember we both slid on the DDR ice,
the snow was incandescent, absurdly
sparkling and crunchy.
And I remember – against my will –
our Last Breakfast;
we were 13, 26 coagulated eyes,
and sitting at the head of the table
a boy who claimed his name was Robin Hood.

a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—comes too late—a crop of inextinguishable regrets. I have wrestled with death. it is the most unexciting contest you can imagine. It takes place in an impalpable greyness, with nothing underfoot, with nothing around, without spectators, without clamor, without glory, without the great desire of victory, without the great fear of defeat, in a sickly atmosphere of tepid skepticism without much belief in your own right , and still less in that of your adversary. If such is the form of ultimate wisdom, then life is a greater riddle than some of us think it to be.
– J. Conrad

А это вы можете описать?
И я сказала, Могу.

Could one ever describe this?
And I answered, I can.

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem [ en ] [ ru ]

You, are, under, the, bombs and fuck they say you are a writer look into your handbag you have books with you you have the moral duty to write about the injured the mutilated the burnt the dead go wash your hands and begin WRITE WRITE WRITE SOMETHING ANYTHING mom once told me it’s not easy to remove bloodstains from bathroom towels women must deal with that often
You, are, under, the, falling, bombs and all you need is codeine and a good amount of how is it called? autosuggestion to pray a whatever orthodox or jew god showing up only late at night and barking lullabies or madrigales so that I ask myself if that’s god or a stray dog waiting for dogot and you need a pen of course you can do it many others did it before you it’s helpful to keep in mind they’re all dead it’s

If you live long enough, you’ll see that every victory turns into a defeat.