… A sensitive (riven) man writes, but only to reach where he knows he cannot reach, to attain the unattainable. He imagines that the instant of writing creates these future encounters, but he knows his imagination fails him. God – the possibility of connecting – fails him, leaves him high and dry. And the idea that failure (non-success at the “game” of being) would usher in some kind of secret achievement also lent him no consolation. For he wanted, here in the writing, but more importantly everywhere, to be level-headed; and yet he could not seem to avoid being a clown – and, what’s worse, obviously being one. He couldn’t find that proper perspective that would dignify or justify his bellows and his blurbs. Imagine a photographer before a breathtaking expanse, his camera ever poised, but whose hands were so buried in the earth that he never got a chance to take his shot. That is, he saw no way to present in a total way the beauty of what his hands worked, of what they felt – his thought, his life, his experience – being buried. However, distantly it’s true, he intuited from time to time that he had encoded it somewhere, all of it in fact, however dispersed – though in a way he could not exactly manage or access, its sense always elsewhere than in the present of his capturing; and yet inevitably it was somewhere – somewhere else, invariably – where what he’d said could not help but become clearer, calmer, and more accurate, having somehow resisted the erosion that time had exercised over him and his own speech. But this intuition never took him very far; he had to be practical. And so he started the whole thing over each time, forced to rely again on the clown’s spontaneous conjurations, escaping sui generis, surrendered to the surprise effects of grammar and tight squints, the fortuity of never-fixed forms and downright boring ideations. No, this game gave him little hope to go on. And yet he wrote. Besides, he knew he would live on until there was no more – which, after all, was something.

To write, to really compose – to really philosophize, these days, if you like– requires something immeasurably precious, then, always extending, always extenuated: respect for “oneself,” one’s aleatory and precarious presence, always othered-without-return, always thrown to chance – the world – alone but never alone, confused and basically blown to bits – but always touching something or someone – always riven, always written as such. A writing whose effects could not be planned, but could only let themselves be affected by another (always another) right now, interrupted and opened to everything in that other “one.” You had to learn how to sustain this crazy respect for the other within – for the other one you’d never know. Such respect, however, could only be sustained in that, each time, some new relationship was drawn: a line extended between you and another, you and me perhaps, but always between one respected “plus” another respected “one.” To write, then: to achieve an impossible connection, to situate oneself in the taking-place of place itself – of relationship – “invisible” but with nothing behind it, instantly broken off and right at the surface, where the truth of what we shared was twice revealed and lost. To connect, then, here: to inspire and drive further the “cause” of such reckless abandon; to conjure the spirit or truth of abandon and to summon ourselves to it. To bring to light exposure as such – to sing and put the lighter to oneself.

—No. To write is just this: to befriend, to meet, without contact.

–To befriend, finally: to respect ourselves; to respect the all we have to shout and sing.