JACQUES DUPINI Am Forbidden
I am forbidden to stop to see. As if I were condemned to see while walking.
While speaking. To see what I speak, and to speak precisely because I do not see.
Thus to show what I do not see, what I am forbidden to see. What language,
unfolding, strikes and discovers. Blindness signifies the obligation to invert the
terms, and to posit walking and word before the eyes. To walk in the night, to
speak through din and confusion, so that the shaft of the rising day fuses and
answers my step, designates the branch, and picks the fruit.
—paul auster
When It Is Impossible
When it is impossible to write a word, to have a brick stand straight up on the
sea. To lay on the table a shaving of the love of language...
Everything begins.
The impossibility of writing splits in two, undoes. To write what isn’t yet written
what has always been written, in the breath and texture of a single person. In the
waiting and the deafness of everyone. And of no one...
Writing without writing, I am less seated at a table than harnessed, than
shackled to this long board of chestnut budding, calling on embers and signs.
That shames me. That chases me.
Outside a strong wind is blowing, cold. A buzzard, high in the sky, spins about
and stops still. I walk limping, I write limping. Through the hills, in the street, in
the void, I stammer, I scribble the airs that blow at me or reject me, the trees and
the people, the clouds, the birds, the light...
—mary ann caws