Accidents (Fragment)

For Ali

"The Sky is the limit, and the limit is the first step".

He read that in the flap jacket of a book, several years ago. He had received the book as a present from a friend and the sentence was splattered somewhere along the book, perhaps at the end of a certain poem, written in a language whose characters he already recognized but yet couldn't infer the meanings behind the squares and circles yet. Not even by guessing.

Guesswork. "I am good at that", he thought. A lot of writer's writing is but guesswork. "Why don't you write a novel?" was probably the question of his professor, who couldn't read out or distinguish the fictions from the theorems. Distinction between novelists and philosophers: Philosophers are not supposed to think with emotions. First aesthetic crusade: Emotions and feelings are but merely different kinds of thoughts.

Fictions. The biggest fiction: Socrates. The biggest fallacy: Plato as the foundation of reason. The casualty: Truth. Historians also write fiction, the most meticulous kind thereof. The curse: A absolute denial of fiction. The refusal to write fiction is translated in being condemned to live many fictions, and out of them. Pure thought. What is that supposed to mean? It is an autobiography without events, without plot.

Smoking is like writing. It is nothing but ellapsed time: Waiting. Constant change of topics, constant change of fiction. Second aesthetic crusade: Intellectual promiscuity, or, the acute realization of Plato's trauma and depression. Dogma isn't the result or the consequence of thinking; rather, it is an antithesis. The tyranny of the mind, it can overtake God's. Living in the waiting room: It's a time warp. Not ageging, but not living either.

Abstinence from language. There's no physical possibility of silence, not even in a soundless chamber. Writing is always an eternally the same: The recreation of romantic loss, or the re-enactment of the same romance. It can happen only under the Archimedean paradox: Use it against yourself. He doesn't talk, he doesn't write, he doesn't respond. But he isn't dead. Abstinence is way to prove you aren't either.

The book with the flap jacket traveled 8000 miles in a black suitcase, then it was lost in a cold apartment on a 13th floor, from which people pissed out of the window and that he couldn't keep paying - or maybe he never did - and that it was lost together with many other books. Not one single moment of love there. He had never read the book, except for some lines about a dead poet, that anyway were in another book.

There was an Italian cafe, and at the same time a revolution. Both of them elsewhere. Certain cold October hope that was written in a postcard. Malina: Why can't letters be sent and read on the same day they're written? The spectacular abyss. The fear. The dread. If not anything else, he wanted those letters to be read. But it would be illegal for the postwoman to do so. 

A certain novel about fictions, read three years later. The novel led to a book of fragments, one of which found its way to the last page of the letter. The book that arrived that day was written in the same city where the letter was going to be sent. The love was another fiction. All of it, probably. He still waited and waited. Probably he would never write, probably the fiction wasn't untrue enough to be believed.

There was not one single moment to breathe; he wanted to drink it all in. All the writing was a distraction, and he still didn't write. That didn't keep him from writing. Paradox: The search for absolute silence, and for extreme privacy; it only comes to those who know that they're being watched. Not watched by God, that would be the end of all literature.

Watched by illiterate relatives wondering what he does by night that doesn't bring any income. Watched by other writers, mostly dead, his favorite readers and those he know that would judge him even more mercilessly than he already does. Watched by those intensely awaited, watched by their callousness, watched by their silence, watched by the impossibility that led to it in the first place. Cruel reminder.

Translation. Interpretation. Criticism. Critique. Grammatology. Treatise. Every word of his put under the lens, baptized in frozen fires, engraved, and taught to master the arts of death. Only death is patient. After all, it is life's eternal patient. Another declension: The unnaturalness of passions, they don't understand time warps. They keep moving along, causing other accidents, and un-writing letters sent, long before they are read.