i am writing today it is so i can read you better provocatively so as to speak at last of the systems obsessing us: the brain produces its drugs which are our utopias.
three poets, three women who are poets, have just sat down at the next table. i know them, we greet each other. Picture theory: these women and i are products of the same system. our albums of perception are full of complicity. we know the structure. but today, i stay alone at my table because i want to go on reading the text of your project.
i read your text and without second thought i note that you have written your name as a reference among others, with a publication date in parentheses. i put the number (4) before inscribing Lovhers and i can only make headway by initials. just imagine a little what fiction might mean in these circumstances. an excess of realism compelled to be revealed only behind a screen of skin: mine. it’s the tension demanded by any application of emotion. tension that gets a quality of attention. maybe there is a link with what you call the sources of ideological transformation.
my friends have left. there are some men, two i’ve spotted, who pass back and forth in front of the sidewalk café. they are crazy, i think. madness is on the loose here, scarcely noticed. i think they’re all crazy. some are my age, others yours. their bodies are very affected. each madness has its own look, as if a crucial incident gives everyone’s life its style.
since 1972, you say, there has been a tendency to distinguish two types of content in long-term memory: episodic and semantic. on that subject, i refer you back to Prochain épisode and Trou de mémoire by an author you probably don’t know. they are books valuable for exploring what you call the ‘forms of consciousness.’
i think all those books you surround yourself with excite you in a vital way. me too, mind you. as if each book produced emanations. we play then with the invisible. seduced, carried away or touched to the quick. each time the strategy of the books must be unmasked and we leave foundering there in the course of the reading, our biological skins.
B. N. says in an interview (exit, winter 76–77): ‘certainly the volcano liberated Lowry, but something unusual happened, a simultaneous relationship between himself and his character, more than an identity, an exchange of personality … In fact, a passage from one to the other, from the writer into his writing until he actually confines himself, so that he is not liberated in the sense you say, but is put into his own inferno. There is an interview with Lowry where he is asked what he would like to write and he answers: Under, under, under the volcano.’
that’s the worst thing that could happen to me. it did happen to me. since then I haven’t stopped reading/deliring to climb back up to the surface, to find my surfaces again. which no doubt explains my obsession with surfaces of meaning.
i read the text of your project and i find it provocative. it takes spaces away from me. in what way is it important for you to understand the mechanisms of creativity? gap, uncertainty, excess, ellipsis. everything has to be transposed, doesn’t it? especially don’t confound the surfaces of meaning and the sense of this text. there is no confidence here though something is being confided to you. i said text but it may be a real letter. Y. V. says it plainly in the fire Episode of La grande ourse: ‘This text was written before it happened to me.’
La Cour is full. a little girl is having fun picking up the plastic arrows they put in our glasses. i think she’s very pretty. H. just came out of the Faubourg. in great shape.
when you quote Sullerot: ‘Not just the dandies but also the “lionesses”!’ what do you mean? has the thought of dying in venice crossed your mind? Your text of the project is full of this type of allusion: that excites me and you know it as on those evenings when you wait for my reaction and you are present, sober, at the metamorphosis. Sober and enraptured, already familiar with the place where you know how to put your hand so as to bring about the effect of reality: lovhers. while i am still trying to read/delirium.
i don’t stop reading/deliring: ‘After the first time i love you doesn’t mean anything’ – ‘Me too is not a perfect answer, because what is perfect can only be formal, and form is missing here.’
you know if you want to get back to the feminine condition over which you pass so rapidly by the way, it increasingly takes the form of our liaison, that is to say the coherence there is between what you write and what i am writing.
you should say acknowledgement. W. and Z., whom you know, spent three years of their life recognizing the words one by one, not all of course, because some of them are unacceptable, unusable, at least in their present state.
i am telling you about my passion for reading you hidden behind these quotations. the facts are such that your project of the text and the text of the project are completed in the taste of the words, in the taste of the kiss. i know that you are real to me/therefore.
Amantes
1980, tr. 1986
SOUS LA LANGUE/UNDER TONGUE
tr. Susanne de Lotbinère-Harwood
Le corps salive, rien pourtant n’est prévu, ni l’abondance des touchers, ni la lenteur furtive, la fureur exacte des bouches. Rien n’est prévu pourtant c’est à la hauteur des yeux que le corps d’abord touche à tout sans prévoir la peau nue, aussi bien le dire, sans prévoir la douceur de la peau qui sera nue avant même que la bouche signale l’état du monde.
Rien ne suggère ici qu’au moindre toucher le regard déjà défaille à vouloir déjà prévoir un tel rapprochement. Rien n’est prévu sinon que la respiration, la répétition des sons entre les chairs. Fricatelle ruisselle essentielle aime-t-elle dans le touche à tout qui arrondit les seins la rondeur douce des bouches ou l’effet qui la déshabille? Rien n’est prévu pourtant au bout du corps la peau fera image du corps car il n’y a rien sans image au bout du corps ce sont les images qui foudroient l’état du monde.
The body salivates, yet nothing is foreseen, not the wealth of touching, not the furtive slowness, the exact frenzy of mouths. Nothing is foreseen yet at eye level is where the body first touches everything without foreseeing the naked skin, and it needs saying, without foreseeing the softness of skin that will be naked even before the mouth signals the state of the world.
Nothing here to suggest that at the slightest touch the gaze already falters wanting already to foresee such a rapprochement. Nothing is foreseen other than the breathing, the sounds resounding flesh to flesh. Does she frictional she fluvial she essential does she, in the all-embracing touch that rounds the breasts, love the mouths’ soft roundness or the effect undressing her? Nothing is foreseen yet at body’s uttermost the skin will image the body for without image there is nothing at body’s uttermost images shatter the state of the world.
On ne peut pas prévoir pencher si soudainement vers un visage et vouloir lécher le corps entier de l’âme jusqu’à ce que le regard étincelle de toutes les fureurs et les abandons. On ne peut pas prévoir l’emportement du corps dans l’infini des courbes, des sursauts, chaque fois que le corps se soulève on ne voit pas l’image, la main qui touche la nuque, la langue qui écarte les poils, les genoux qui tremblent, les bras qui par tant de désir entourent le corps comme un univers. On ne voit que le désir. On ne peut pas prévoir l’image, les fous rires, les cris et les larmes. L’image est tremblante, muette et polyphonique. Fricatelle ruisselle essentielle aime-t-elle le long de son corps la morsure, le bruit des vagues, aime-t-elle l’état du monde dans la flambée des chairs pendant que les secondes s’écoulent
