that is luminous, that illuminates, that penetrates the darkness of/in language.
We have elected to close both ‘Futures’ and the Reader with another homage to Brossard’s innovation. In Picture Theory the reader discovers Hologram, a book within a book. A similar discovery occurs when we turn the page to find Mauve Horizon within the covers of Mauve Desert. Books hold worlds of possibility, even other books! Avant Desire ends with another book: And Suddenly I Find Myself Remaking the World. This full text was translated, as we mentioned, in part by Oana Avasilichioaei and in part by Rhonda Mullins. Each translator leaves something of her imprint on the text she has read and translated. This motion to and fro, from one thinking perspective to another, is part of the invitation we offer in reading Brossard’s essay, which crisscrosses translations and translators. Here, too, the electric energy of Brossard’s work is made multiple through these engagements in translations, as well as book design.
Deep in the incandescence of language we surface and spiral back and forward to what is the ‘avant’ of desire: not original, as though existing in some mythic beginning, and yet there is something of the grandeur of myth in the Brossardian oeuvre. What comes before desire? Is there a before or does desire start with desire? This would suggest a kind of impossible trajectory, for how can desire leap toward desire? But perhaps that impossible movement in and out of itself is key to understanding how the concept of avant desire might come to embrace something untranslatable in Brossard’s writing (a reminder that tending to the present moment, to the body and word and thinking of the moment, we hold our own power, and in that holding of the present moment we have the possibility of creating our future. Or futures. We, all who are present in the text we have before us, wherever and whenever we are, we have the power. We occupy space in utopia when we are together, thinking, listening, and talking. We are in ‘the meeting place of our desires’ and ‘the future can’ and will ‘still be swayed.’24
Desirings
LOGICAL SUITE
from Nicole Brossard: Selections
tr. Pierre Joris
everything gels white
in happy time
deep dark also
all chaos when your hand passes too much
then departure for
belly thus all is there
as sprout as latency
oversteps the mark and never restricts itself
curved line never gels in the past
what the belly espouses up front
in my saying naked
the colour though fictive so true
cuts in the delirious black
mutual attractions
when intimate renewal
appropriates from
us locks in together
displace the shadow so slowly
around us
that the bonds move very initiatory
between the lines the liquid slides
and imposes itself novel
thus from the body pleasure gushes
delicious humidity the mauve rests
and inscribes itself radiant fixity
afterward it’s so little
once time’s slid out of reach
afterward it’s however
to retrace one’s steps
when the figures put forward rip
it’s only initial and doesn’t stop being so
the movement
displacing distorting
the horizon the horizon broken
always too imponderable
to act and tend
in the risen night
toward the hidden places
to act swaying between
the world rhythm the authentic
doubly silence pours forth carnal
again and without cease
entrancing contrast
that reworks the outlines
draws them away from the goal
forces our orientation
again
and time shakes from not being eternal
there is the palpable night shifts feverish
that is to say disconcerting verbal variant
oh how the invariable ‘elsewhere’ tames the pronoun
in this imprecise zone of the present
never was the ephemeral so close to the trap
yet it is a matter of the same saying
between charm and trap, it oscillates
suspension of the act
to understand is a sojourn
excluding any definition
to breathe to show nothing
though
