Dear Buried Resistances:
I sent you a few notebooks written by a man who unsigned his identity only to see it appear again tethered to the fibrous emptiness of his language. Look at how the manipulated smoke rings are throwing a slippery light on his frontispiece. You might have said to him that forty-five minutes was clearly not enough for the slowness of ingestion, for Saturday to exhaust its prefectural impressions. To feign another color is slow, difficult work, no longer taboo (or regressive) for the softening stations of the painter’s eye. But our suspicion of the essential cannot afford losing sight of the soggy distance between East and West, of the carbon thud-slap that is essentially the consequence of his ideological blossom.
Even without a center or heart, flesh is fundamentally marked. As it becomes hidden behind layers and layers of calligraphic or tutelary ornament, it still sends—sometimes without first saying so—its intended regards.
Though it is a mostly uniform belief that a poet is never constrained by the drafts in her fictive portfolio, I wonder if he (the man in question) thought at all about the other way around.
Here, everything is a source; and everything subtly bears the maternal pressure of parentheses. Yours is a depth detached of all surrounding becoming substance, like an instrument that refuses to cut pieces of polished stone from the summer glare of mountains. But I’m sure you realize that, on the pure level of praxis, photographs mutilate the promise of light. Thus, much would come of the elastic time of chrysanthemums, of the brief and finely measured paper of the wrestler’s cigarette. Are you as excited as I? The food for our jotted possibilities is on the table. I will send it to you soon.
It was Emily Dickinson, no, who proposed that the alphabet is a series of fragments with which one can place side by side what, what was, and what will be? Don’t you think that it is the same in Japanese?
For originality to be transferred to its interminable translations, inspiration has to select moments that can pass back through an impeccable itinerary of rivers. It is in its adolescent nature to repeat itself, as a long uninterrupted text or an inconvenient hat dance from Hiroshima. The decentered medium, once “started,” unites a single time—that of its fabrication and that of its consumption—into one plum-colored impulse. That is to say we “converse” without the indirect accompaniment of a conversation.
Perhaps our death has been previously written in elaborate anthologies of sugar, a pinch of which the divinity sometimes samples with vital pincers. As you know, the past is merely the recognizable bones of the moment, and each month is but an echo, seasoning—then sponging up—our undated ink.
Please write soon,