Trance

L’autre nuit, Je rêve, ou presque, et un texte, me vient aux yeux fermés. Le jeu semble cosmique, religieux, Peut-être une Ecriture, Je m’entends à deviner les mots, un par un, Comme si c’était ça, L’expérience de la révélation : Lire un texte, Pour la première fois, Les yeux fermés.

The other night, I dream, or almost, and a text, comes to my closed eyes. The game seems cosmic, religious, Maybe a Scripture, I hear myself guessing the words, one after the other, As if it was that, The experience of Revelation : Reading a text, For the first time, With closed eyes.

Writing, sleep and blindness are the ingredients of my reading.

A nocturnal vision, one more calling, to pull my weakness upwards, to help me transcend my idiosyncrasies from above. Once again, my true self came to me at night, in the dark, and I had to surrender awakeness and reasonable spirit.

A few minutes before that :

J’écris sur le papier dans le noir, Mes doigts et mon intuition, co-substantiels, Ils partagent la même approximation, La même puissance

I write on the sheet in the dark, My fingers and my intuition, co-substantial, They share the same approximation, The same powerfulness

The last few weeks have confirmed what I knew : my writing is intuitive. But it took me all these years, doubting my guts to the point of piling degree after degree, to return to my hunch and expand the realisation : my reading, too, is intuitive.

Intuitive, or nothing.

Homer, Hesiod, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus — six months already that I read them all, patiently, exhaustively (ou presque ¹), and I finally get what all these institutional years had promised deceitfully. But my gold quest would still be imperceptible to them : I am not the expert, the linguist, the technician, the rote-memory learner. My pen on my finger : my underlines and highlights speak just for me ; each of the illustrious inspirations only get to my soul because we are both friends of the words, and they demonstrate, detail after detail, the beauty sans fin ² of this term I just recently learnt : felicity. They found the words I had, for so long, been looking for.

Intuitive reading, sleepyhead, the drug-free crackhead ; their words are the last bits of materiality still switching me on ; my perversion is aesthetic and symbolic, letters my fetish, I am obsessed about those books I will never be able to traverse normally. Trance-reading ; it takes dozens of pages to find the right line, and decades to descry the writers worth the while, so naturally my patience en prend un coup ³, but I have learnt to observe through the microscope of my attention the sprouts of my future selves, these pointless grains we pass through, not even noticing them now, but they reveal themselves months and years later, as we utter a line, as we enter a script. Reading is learning, and learning is slow, it is this sleep-like appearance of rest that is in fact the whole cosmos and its chaotic Creation — if you look closely enough, there is nothing that changes quickly ; speed is only the indicator of your wider scale of perception.

I write in my sleep like a somnambulist walking ; my writing is truly trace, Derrida had got his felicity right — even my reading, reading of books, blind reading in nocturnal visions and re-reading as I wakefully analyse them — all of them traces, my script, inscriptions in me left through me by some level of me. They illustrate différance, the internal scission that proves for ever being’s dependence on time : my soul observes, her keen eye open, but the self keeps scripting, raturant ses émois, raturant, cessé moi, ⁴ “me” is a lemma from a language of another time. “Self”, “moi”, “soul”, I still don’t understand these words, but I know they are right ; that is my gut, the élan vital ⁵ of this writing, as they will call it. And remember when I had told you that Derrida’s différance was none but Leibniz’s, as my pen opens itself to me from within, and discovers the words, representatives of the entire universe populating me, and this time it is Leibniz engaging them :

In his soul, there are vestiges of everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him and even traces of everything that happens in the universe, even though God alone could recognise them all.

Image courtesy: Genedeitchcredits

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