Relationship with a lost object: Mourning with Derrida's "Fors"

Melancholia and Mourning - Freud.  A healthy Interiorization of the Other.  The memorialization of the loved one.  In order to protect the heart from despair, the soul incorporates the loved one within and she lies within as an ever embraced foreign body --- separate and yet, internalized, still capable of transformative discourse.  Mourning well is supposed to be when the loved one can be introjected.  Bad mourning is when the loved one is incoporated ... a crypt within, an empty space.

He is coming.  The monument that holds my loved one's empty place, refuses to fill it in, allows it to continue to sting... I have always called it a soul shard ... my heart holds monuments past, present, future.  The painful presence of love --- it  takes a shard of my heart each time I choose to love.  It makes my heart a tender place. 

Even for Derrida, anOther I never personally knew.  I keep seeing his words and his life's water pours over me.  A dead man's ever-living words.

Wind in the loquat tree

I can't sleep but lie awake, restless in the sleeping hours.   No peace.  Through the window I can see above the loquat tree that the high wind pushes dark clouds overhead at pace.  The leaves of the loquat tree heave in the wind.  But their inconstant movements against the racing clouds give the dark hours of early morning an unreality.  Loquat tree cut out and pasted against a smokey black backdrop that is streaming past like a reel of black and white film.  Faint rays of moonlight do nothing except to add an eery, flickering luminescence.  A grotesque glow.  It allows me to see the streaming, tormented clouds.  Driven forward by raging bulls.  Nothing bodes well in the inconstant unreality of the early morning with high wind...  Nothing bodes well when the heaving of the leaves and the racing of the clouds are you and I flying in opposite directions, moving away from each other in opposite directions.  Speeding away from each other.  Blowing away with the wind.  Out of time, out of rythmn, arrhythmia, fraught, lost.  I am a loquat tree tossed in the wind.  You are the high driven clouds.  In between us is a tempest of space.  Grounded, skybound.  Imprisoned in incongruent spaces.  Touch shattered like glass.  Silent against the roar of the night winds.

she fell

She fell

I recalled while I walked out into the sunshine and up the tree-lined road

She was awash in her own tears, all her fluids draining out, all her tears, pounding

She crossed

... my mind while I adjusted my cardigan which I had unknowingly put on inside out

She had sat, red-eyed, hurt, fearful, weary, worn out, diffuse ... like an inflamed, unhealed wound

It must have been the sunshine, or the trees with their diverse spectrum of green, in contrast to the red, pulsating, eclipsing, burning, smothering world that I had glimpsed through her eyes.  At that moment, having just received a note that took me back to her narrative but then in the rush of going I had forgotten again.  So it was just for a moment I remembered her fully and her telling of how the pressure had built to a crescendo in her head and how she had slept for days afterwards... for a moment it was very clear to me

But by the time I had reached the end of the tree-lined road I had forgotten, and it had receded from memory with the embrace and the gentle kisses of the morning sunshine and the cooling vibrancy of the perfect greens and sprouting leaves against the richly wooded, mossy branches, thick, solid, earthy trunks.  Arm width in circumference, thick enough so that my imagined embrace cannot reach all the way around.  Imagining the scent of the musky, woody, earthy tree.  Maybe it’s an oak.  I don’t know – it’s like my father who I imagine, bearded with those perfectly chartreuse leaves reaches down around me with arms like great branches and I feel wonderful, wonderful, Everything is right in the world... for a moment.

I did though, towards the edges of my vision, my scope, and perhaps not at all too clearly, in between the going to and fro, in the growing heat of the day, there the few moments during the business of the day, momentarily, as my eye lit upon an orchid blossom that finds itself bizarrely next to a poststructuralist tome, so innocent but in the new connection, complicit, or more stridently, the stool, the padded chair where she had sat and the residue of her grief still lay upon it, then as the red, seeping, inflamed-ness of her moment where I also was, yesterday, again stained the edges of this space, I did wonder again...

where is she?

I drew him over me like a cloak

This morning I woke up alone
It was the kind of aloneness that stretches out like a desert on both sides
I was alone and it surprised me so I looked around
I was alone in my head
And it could have been that momentarily I had entered another dimension
but I knew I hadn't because I had the sense of time
I knew without a doubt that I had been alone all night
That deep inside me I had rolled away and he had rolled away
We had rolled away to the edges and placed the universe in between us
And so even though I resisted it
And I liked my aloneness even though it was base
...Wait! No! I didn't like my aloneness.  It felt like I wasn't breathing.  But it was very still.  And it was the stillness that I liked.
And at least I was clean.  I wasn't always-merging, breathing into-breathing out of ... rubbed up in the earth, rubbed against.  Rubbed raw.  I felt fragile.  I didn't/couldn't stand to be touched.   Just for a while.
And so even though I resisted it I drew him over me like a cloak.
I drew his flesh and his skin and his hair over me like a cloak.
My bones received him.  My bones that had lain on the bed became covered at last with flesh.
But it was his flesh and something in me wanted to reject it, wanted to keep it, wanted to cast it off, wanted to clutch it tight around me in case it slipped off onto the bed.
And in drawing it around me I found that his lungs had found their way inside my chest bones
and I began to draw in careful breaths.

tree of life

This morning
I was wrapped up in him
A tangle of roots and branches
Twigs, leaves, dry, red, yellow, green and pungent humus
We wove each other down into the rich earth
and lifted ourselves upwards towards an open sky
entwined with vines, bursting with shoots
and within we were burning brighter than any star
cool, fresh, live with sap
diffuse with air

Derrida, The work of mourning

Derrida is dead ... I really believe it now, now that I am reading him writing about death. 

The death of Others. 

And then Wrapping them in writing mourning he had killed them again.  In my eyes ...

... and besides now I see my own death.

Myopia.

Perhaps this writing of mourning has freed me from my myopia.

...

My myopia is as opposed to her myopia which was probably something quite different.  And believe me, I don’t want to write the Word so carelessly even though I have written it 4 times and alluded to it once.  It is an empty hole, base space.  And while it seemed something projected in front of me so that I behold it out there, it rushes in close to me at unexpected turns.  The sensations of it then come from within like it was birthed in me before I had ever begun to know it.  It’s a dreadful little gap.  It seems infinitely deep, with a small opening somewhere close to my lungs or heart.  And through the opening I can feel the pain of your not-being whistle through me as if I was strung on a wire.

And sometimes it is just a twinge.  A twinge twinges at unexpected turns like when taking the strawberry jam from the back shelf of the refrigerator.  And then I feel the twinge like a splinter in my lung. It’s the twinge first followed by the sense of empty space, nothing.  And I wonder if I have lost a coin.  Or lost for the second time the little silver Michelin man fallen down behind the bed.  I can’t find it and I’ve looked everywhere.  And I had liked knowing it was there in my box of secret treasures but now I’ve looked everywhere.   and its gone.  And then I take the jam to the table as if I was walking through a nebula cloud full of small stars.

...

My myopia and then the unsuspecting reading of Derrida’s writing of goodbyes has led to all our deaths.  In the face of my myopia when my eyes became fingers that clutched at vulnerable strands.  But not at all some empty space... some space that twinges when at the moment of trivial vulnerability in the front of the refrigerator searching for the jam.  It’s the inanities of the mundane when I have some sudden dreadful recognition of Derrida’s-not-being and the not-being-of-others and the not-being-that-will-one-day-be-mine.

...  It’s a little dark here and has that feel of being near an infinite edge.  And that sense of almost falling.  And I don’t care whether at the other side of your being-after-being-here is the blazing burning of the wondrous monstrous blaze of nebular star births, at the point where all the stars that have ever been come bursting from the sacred centre....

... and that is because you are simply not-here.  And any of your futures in the wonderlands of star bursts are without-me.  You are simply not-here...

...  and I-am-not-with-you.

EBSCOhost: Writing the body: Toward an understanding of l'écriture féminine

EBSCOhost: Writing the body: Toward an understanding of l'écriture féminine

An antique scholarship

"Some years ago there was in the city of York a society of magicians.  They met upon the third Wednesday of every month and read each other long, dull papers upon the history of English magic.
They were gentleman-magicians, which is to say they had never harmed any one by magic - nor ever done any one the slightest good.  In fact, to own the truth, not one of these magicians had ever cast the smallest spell, nor by magic caused one leaf to tremble upon a tree, made one mote of dust to alter its course or changed a single hair upon any one's head.  But, with this one minor reservation, they enjoyed a reputation as some of the wisest and most magical gentlement in Yorkshire."

Susanna Clarke "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel" p.3.

Just a few more sips

"On the good nights
when the bottle's empty
we always want
just a little more,
half a glass,
a few sips,
a taste.
We know
this desire
can be dangerous
to pursue,
that it can make
mornings difficult,
so usually we
brush our teeth
let the dog in,
lock the doors,
but sometimes,
even as we say
We really should
get ready for bed,
instead of loading
the dishwasher
we will search
for the corkscrew,
all the while
shaking our heads
in wonder
at this willingness
to ignore the clocks
and the fact we have
to work tomorrow,
this irresponsibility,
this evidence
even after all these years
of the unquenchable desire
for each other's company."
"The Good Nights" by Joseph Mills

Symmetry and Asymmetry

Difference and this infinite postponement of sameness in the encounter with the beloved other.  So much the same and yet in between is the chasm of difference that is ever insurmountable.  Is this the torque that charges and electrifies and enlivens the sharp edge of encounter?  The depth of seeing and knowing the other is unable ever to be crossed into absolute knowing.  It is beyond us both.  Each of us an entire universe of the unknown if we choose to look.  And so much of our meeting counts on the vagaries and inconstancies of time, timing, and the invasive, abrasive and indispensible world.  And yet each time I hesitate. I cannot take it for granted that I will be for you what I hope and that you will be for me also as I hope.  We have both symmetry and asymmetry in being which means for me that our encounters, the colours of our entre into that space of poignant meeting are unpredictable in the degree and the vitality on both our parts.  The richness and the fabric of our encounter is a changeable yet rhythmic and aesthetic landscape.  I would not be without our perplexing misunderstandings and cross-pathed sorrows and our capricious and exquisite moments of paradise in the breath of the other, our disappointments and our unpredictable journeys through each other's galaxies, nebulae and stardust.  A beautiful diversity to our being and the enriching process of our journey of knowing.

I sleep, but my heart is awake. Son 5:2

The dysfunction of yearning

Sate me with raison cakes
Succour me with apricots
For I am afflicted with love...
Son 2:5-6

What a fine line there is between desire and dysfunction!  There is nothing so close to the tipping point between sanity and madness.  Am I sane; am I mad?  Am I willingly deceived?  How exploitative, how irrational my own biology in the mad passion of love?  Nothing can drive a person to the edge like the onslaught of chemical obsession.  And nothing can rip appart the foundations of the world like the failure of love.  That line stretches out until it snaps.  And the vulnerable die at the point of paralysis.  At the point of being missed.  At the moment of sinking into the earth unseen, unknown.  I dissipate and lose substance.  I lose breath and vanish.

My soul went out when he spoke

I saw C. today.  His outline, his form, his eyes.  Heard his voice.  Still a vestige, still a million miles away.  I reached out to touch this mirror, a mirror into another space.  A white room, his face, even his voice.  My body and my bones reached out through my unmoving hands.  My cells, all the water and the blood, my humanity, my earthiness spilled over into my raging present.  but in the reflection I appeared absolutely still, i stilled the whirlpool, caught it behind my eyes, caught it up behind gates.  If only the rushing and swirling could be visible, the pumping and racing, and depths, depths like the primordial watery depths of the deep... rushing raging water, streaming out of my quiet eyes.  And he saw, he did, he must have seen me.  I felt the peace of being seen.  and not the disappointment of being missed like two meteors passing in a distant part of the universe, in the cold emptiness of space, passing a trillion miles apart, passing by without meeting and continuing the journey into the cold dark for what reason, for what purpose, only absurdity.  I saw him and he saw me, we saw each other.  And maybe my mirror tricked me into the sense of being seen.  maybe through my mirror I saw myself, only myself.  did i paint his edges, his softness, read into his eyes the gates holding back his own ocean.  i question the memory of this vestige, this moment of present, that moment of being released from the pain of desire, that space that i already feel the loss of... an emptiness, and the thirst returns, and the separation returns.  feeling held back.  feeling trapped behind this face.  and behind this face I am adrift and alone in the deep darkness of my own wild seas. great waves, i am swept up to the foaming top of a wave and i am sure to be plunged deep into the rolling waters, pushed down deep, spinning, and trying to breathe.  but with one look he stills the storm.  that moment when he saw me, the peace of a thousand summers flowed through me.  i suddenly came to rest.  ... and now the vestige is gone and i try again to breathe.

I rose up to open to my [b]eloved/ and my hands dripped with myrrh/ and my fingers flowing with myrrh on the handles of the bolt/  I opened to my [b]eloved/ but my [b]eloved had left/ He passed on/ My soul went out when [h]e spoke/ I sought [h]im but I could not find [h]im/ I called [h]im, but [h]e did not answer me.

Son 5:5-6 MKJV

Being in motion and stopping still

It is a dark and stormy night and it is a painted space ...  The wind, the creaking wood, the glow in the dim room.  Both real and unreal...  I contrive it.  My being in the dark and stormy night, being alone in the creaking wooded room.  I ought to be asleep.  Lie asleep and dream sensible dreams.  Wake and progress in the morning.  Progress through the minute to minute being-in-the-world.  But the painted space, a vacuum in the roaring night draws me to infinity.  The written moment that transcends the tyranny of linear chronology.

C. is not here.  And two pieces of my soul lie sleeping like angels.  I need an elixir because I am being dragged down to the wasted sacks of unused moments.  It is as if this fever draws me to confront these raining moments.  An antikythera - I need the antikythera.  I need the calculation, the orientation that will free me from my fears, at least to rise above the morose realities and to loose this cowardice.  Tied to C. his absence is like acid on my skin, tied to my sleeping soul shards - my every waking moment concerns their continued existence in my world ... and the fear of any harm towards them is my shadow and daily companion.  Love too much.  Possess too much.  Aladdin's treasure trove asleep in my room, in my big bed.

I find myself alone in the darkened flat in the darkened street, of a darkened city, in a darkened world spinning in a dark universe.  Spinning recklessly out of orbit.  Daughter of a reckless race.  I want to stop still.  Afraid to stop still.  I'm tied and my bonds to life run like veins through my arms, my soul shards throb against the wound they left in my heart.  I am not free.  And the greatest fear is that none of it should matter.  That it should be absurd.

The slow dying in absence

There is a peace lily wilting in the corner.  Dying in the midst of its verdant leaves.  Its my grandmother's and I must keep it alive.  Its her last green thing.  I feel stretched taut beside its presence.  We pass by each other not seeing each other.  I look past it.  My edges are fraying privately.  Peeling off strand by strand.  And I don't share this splintering with the green plant.  It wilts on its own, in its own reverie, its own memories of her hands, her room, her bronze watering can, the bergamot scent of her tea.

I can't sleep, even though when I close my eyes and then open them it's morning.  And I am not fully awake because I have to will myself to be in the speaking and the doing of the everyday.  I am all future and all past.  I am the last moment and the anticipation of the moment to come.  But the present is abject.  Because the present is the parched plant.  The cognition of the pain of loss.  The dull ache of the separation.  The hopelessness of the emptiness of a desire.  Its shameful really.  Its a vanity, to be so unsatisfied with this moment.  Blue skies, chirping birds who cannot think of desire delayed, only flitting from present to present, the worm, the insect, the ant, the flick of a leaf.  I am an Empress of Moments, so sated, and so petulant, nothing else will do but the gratification of that desire that by the arrangment of the stars, cannot be, not for all the gold, in the right now moment.  And so it manifests itself as a tangible shooting pain, in the lung, in the small of the back, at the back of the throat; a restlessness, a darkness, an absconding from the horror of the reality of it not being present.  And what is the shape of this desire?  In the strength of my desire his shape is set, I imagine his words and glances and looks but can I even predict that the alchemical reaction that is ours will be as my memories and my anticipations paint it?  What if he may slip by, look through, god forbid he should misunderstand my urgency, or fail to see, overlook my anxieties, dismiss my phantom pains that have built into a fortress of tumult.  And all this power he has over my fragile substance held so precariously so that even a puff of wind will disperse it to the nothingness that I secretly fear.  This is consciousness and sentience at its most scandalous; making us vulnerable to a multitude of small deaths.

Vertigo

Things continued on for a week when he left, flew away, vanished from sight.  Just the remnant of him was left. he was like a ghost in the machine, the only proof of his continued existence was the beeping arrival of a text.  he's become an electrical pulse, an static image in an computerized interface, an array of letters.  he might as well be beyond the dark lands.  perhaps to feel his presence from the void like the brush of a breath across one's cheek.

but I relished the freedom, the un-mediated control of this room, the non-negotiated space where I could order my world alone - a star there, a rainbow there, an oil lamp, an ice giant... such creative quiet.  such a paradise of peace.  how i could take this time to fold a thousand cranes.  i skipped and they flew around me in complex formation.

and then they fell one by one, dropping, until they were in piles on the floor. the space began to close.  dark freedom.  I paced this prison cell like a derelict, like a restless beast in the night, a panther in the shadows ... only light reflected in its yellow eyes... reflecting the light of the moon.  i'm trapped in my perfect array of space... and it has become abject to me - a horror in pastels.  in the gentle breeze i am mocked by my paper constructions.

my desire makes me teeter on the edge of the abyss.  how i would dive into your memory.  let go of my careful architecture and plummet into the debris of your flood tides.  collide into my solar system like a voracious black hole... shatter the dimensions of this clean white page with the charcoal rubbings of your wild trees... i have swept this space clear and this breath has flown.  my breath.

To write a text; to be a text

The world is swirling vortex, atheist logos on buses merging with 17th century french philosophers wagering on God, volcanoes changing 21st century transport in the Northern Hemisphere, the small world got bigger - cut off in a way not felt for a century, and amidst it all my brain pawing at the idea of 'being text' and the notion of certainty.  Where is the anchor in the world?  It feels off-axis.  Nothing, not even identity is static, dependable, specific, singular.  Derrida becomes more and more a dark omen - he is right, but gives no clues as to how to manage a constantly morphing universe - if only he wasn't so obtuse.

The line between the reality of the author and the reality of the text - both become beings - a sacred line is crossed.  A transgression... Shulamith, the pinnochio of her author, has more sure being than her maker ...

Tel Aviv

... if C. will wake up!

We did eventually get to Tel Aviv.  Compared to Jerusalem the entrance to city via the bus station was like 'Brave New World' - all grey concrete and gaudy signage.  The impression lasted as we walked towards the centre of the city via a park.  A used syringe on the ground, litter, seedy gatherings and under the sparse trees, drunken and passed out were the failed aliyah-ots - ethiopian black jews who had obviously not successfully assimilated into the promised land.  We wondered who was in control there - perhaps the drug lords and not the ubiquitous police (who seemed to be ubiquitously absent in this squallid suburb).

Tel Aviv is a new city set along the coastal beaches north of Jaffa.  It has grown haphazardly in spurts - and the building material of choice is rapidly erected concrete and not the hewn stone of Jerusalem.  In central Tel Aviv the architecture while still often shabby had taken enough time to allow beauty to emerge.  There were the pretty 1920's art deco apartments and public buildings, and the area around Nahalat Binyamin had a very cuban feel, with the homes looking like old Havana.

We ate chocolate at the 'Chocolate by the bald man' (been yearning to try it) and then continued down Sheinken St towards the mediterranean beaches.

The beaches and blue sea were beautiful.  Shining and (relatively clean) - young tanned israelis playing makot, fashionistas holding a fashion shoot with such young and underdressed models, a disturbing lack of concern about kosher anything (the market sells fresh pork!!!) and the beachside restaurants sell seafood.  we drank wine under a beach umbrella, and thought homewards.

On returning for our last night in Jerusalem, in the twilight the moon was white and huge in the pale blue sky.  the city looked sad (that we were going) but C.  said it wasn't the city, it was me. all the shutters were hanging in despair.  the stones were tinged gray with melancholy ... even the buses seemed to groan as they trawled up and down the ascents.  We had one last meander through the old city and then turned just in time to catch the last arab bus to the mt of olives.

Jerusalem's darkened streets and plazas and her jaded watchmen.

Petra and the Starscape

We spent the night in the Al-furnuq Hidab at the head of the wadi.  In the morning we walked down the road on one steep side of Wadi Musa (The Gully of Moses) towards the narrow clefts that house the ancient city of the Nabateans.  Our entry included an amusing horse ride and then the fabulous walk through the wind/water cut red sandstone cliffs.  There were scores of people there but one of the main attractions were the rakish bedouin.  They looked like princes set up on their camels - princes or pirates.  C. was drawn to their tent/cave lifestyle and their communion with their animals.  This impression led us to the Bedouin village on the mountain above Petra.  We went home with the bedouin, their camels and donkeys and would then eat a bedouin barbecue under the moonlit sky of little Petra.

I can imagine the Bedouin in the past, Petra has always been in their guardianship until tricked by a swiss explorer in the 1800's.  We met some of the women in the village.  Life is hard, in the desert climate, the outdoor life is hard on the skin, and while the bedouin do not tend to drink alcohol, the culture of smoking has made an enormous impact on health.  Many even young people we met seemed to be in the early stages of emphysema.

For all this they are a beautiful, proud and generous people who love to tell stories, pose convoluted riddles and are deeply connected to their land.

"The earth is my mattress and the stars, my blanket!"

Riding in the donkey train in such an exotic landscape with exotic peoples brought the line from the Song of Songs to my mind - "I went down to the nut garden to see if the pomegranates had flowered ... and lo! I found myself in a Prince's train" (a caravan of camels, a procession of donkeys)!!

black as the tents of kedar

Beautiful views over Petra in the sunset and we recalled the adventures of the day - we had made a wild journey down to Eilat and crossed the border into Jordan via the Yitzak Rabin/Araba crossing.  The no man's land in between the two countries that we had to walk felt like the 'green mile'.  A further wild taxi ride (very fast - I had a great fear for children, women walking, and the two enormous wedding parties, goat herds we encountered) brought us to the famous Wadi.  We met Bedouin traders along the way.  Took a great interest in C. due to the Thai Red Shirt protesters being in the world news (not that C. had a red shirt - his shirt had a didgeridoo on it).  The Bedouin men have dark skin, long black curly hair, wear kohl under their eyes, and sport elegantly crafted beards and goatees.  Crowned with the large checked head scarves and the occasional gold tooth or ear ring they make an immediate association with pirates!!

Black as the tents of Kedar!!!  The tents are made of dark goat skins.  I wonder if Shulamith was bedouin...

Fuschia highlights and pomegranate petals

From our roof top columbarium I can hear the sounds of birds, children crying, laughing, playing, and general village ruckus.  The hazy sky drifts over the rough and bare, stony landscape - all white stone and grey-green of the olive trees.  We have had two showers of rain here, which has excited the birds and freshened the air.  Its now cool, and I would describe the scent of the air but I smell like fruit salad and it overpowers everything else.

This morning in desperate need of a femme session I dragged C. with me to the local gathering of the banot yerushalayim at a pink painted salon for Only Women.  C. was despatched once I discovered I could indeed have something done!  I saw an art film once about a Lebanese hairdressing salon and the lives and dramas of the hairdressers and their clients - so I was intrigued at any rate at whether I would recognise similarities (though I was definitely in desperate need of salvation where beautiful hair is concerned).  In the space of a whirlwind, the maternal hairdresser, short, pretty, blond streaked hair, and the ubiquitous black suede tracksuit had whisked me into a chair and was quite determined to re-dye my hair dark brown and add fuschia highlights (for free).  My protestations were brushed aside!  Needless to say, I now sport fuschia highlights and have a classic Jordanian hair style.  I feel like Queen Rania (which is high praise indeed).

Many of the women come into the salon donned in black from head to toe, but once inside its all off, and there are highlights, perms, cuts, babies crying, waxing in the arabic style and eyebrow styling all enhanced with the local gossip.  I was instructed not to talk, and she would fix the travesty of my last haircut and colour!  It was easy to see what a close relationship the women had here.  Everyone knows each other, families, relatives, children.  The group gathers its strength in this powerful place.  It was a lovely experience though walking home alone up the lane I felt my new hair was being assessed by the entire community.  The attention did leave me momentarily when some irate shopkeeper pelted a young boy with a broccoli head.

C. isn't feeling well.  He has weathered the stress of the last few days less externally than I.  But we are hoping that by morning we can travel across the border and see the sun set over Petra and her ancient nabatean ruins.  And so, our enforced stay in this beautiful land continues to yield the promise of pomegranates.  Even now, their red petals are beginning to open and Ithaca does not seem so far away.

Ibrahim's house of peace

We have found solace (from the pergatory of the inevitable obstacle and the agony of separation!!!) at Ibrahim's peace-house.  It towers along with the other white stone terraced house/apartments along the edge of the Mt of Olives.  We have the luxurius privacy a newly plastered white room on the roof (seems luxurious in relation to the last week when we slept on rooftops with scores of other travellers).  We have one window that is a portal into the exotic - like we were eagles soaring over the rolling judean hills, rolling off into the Jordan.  The sunset bathed the extraordinary view in a dusky pink, with the nearby call of the muezzin, the scenario seemed like the music of sunrise in that very bad movie about angels and falling, and the cost and blessing of being human.  A hard day, an extraordinary day... and finally a house of peace.

... and I would take you into my mother's house, into the chamber of the one who conceived me, there I would give you spiced wine to drink, the nectar of the pomegranate...

C. says we have finally met the King of Salem (the ever apparent Melchizedek).

An interlude with Jacque "Writing and Difference" (Madness)

There was a space of blue sky and swallows today in the old crusader hospice in the Jewish quarter.  I read Derrida on madness and the earth inexplicably coloured up - I found myself in the present once again (instead of that pergatory of waiting for the inevitable obstacle).  He was critiquing Foucault, Descartes and Schelling and perhaps the entire philosophical chorus from Greece to Heidegger.  Nietzsche was mentioned but not entirely in the negative.  He may have been keeping score.  The question was really about who in fact is mad, and how do we then define it in the medium of language.  Ideal reading material for such a day with the threat of Icelandic Volcanoes getting off their rocky haunches and stomping all over European progressivism.

In the end it was not only about madness, but madness and dreaming - neither have a hold on reality but then reality becomes the realm of description based on the senses.  Descartes claims only mathematics is sane by this definition.  Derrida denies the process of defining anything.

I don't know what to claim in this entre into Jacque's brain.  Though I suppose he would say the words are no longer his and quite rightly signify his absence.  The words alone are infinite.  Mad or sane, and what does language have to do with it?  And what exactly is the 'Cogito'.  The mad don't think?  The mad think but can't apply the meaning?  The mad can't utter the words that produce encounter?  Jacque!!!

I will try the essay on Jabez and Jacque's exploration of the world within the book.

An object lesson in separation and longing

How the stones have lost their lustre!!  We are longing to return home.  Longing for reunions.  Longing to give presents and hugs.  Its an abyss of emptiness, this longing, a gaping hole in my body, in my chest like a black hole, star destroyer.  Intense, tangible and at the same time the policeman in my head says "indulgent child, stop your crying!"  When there was no challenge to my happiness I was easy, and free, and now, all the caverns have collapsed and the stars have fallen from the sky.

Yearning, the abyss separating us from paradise, from stasis.  Yearning - this out-of-balance, incredible desire to be in balance - with what? - with society? with nature? with each other? with our own selves? within our selves? with our ideals and conceptions?  Palpable longing for homeostasis... and yet when homeostasis is achieved we search for a challenge that will keep us in tension with the world.  We require this tension to become??  Without this tension we are in danger of subsiding, with desensitization to the world, we lose all forward momentum.

The heightening of longing leads to heightening of the imagination, in my imagination I see a rainbow of scenarios in which my desires are fulfilled.  Children embraced, turkish delight munched, copper coffee pots admired, scarves and hats tried on, charades and laughing, photographs, the lighting of incence, the hyperbolic descriptions and laughter, the exotic tales of the camels on the hills.

I have merged with my Shulamith.  I am the apparition and she becomes real, the vessel of my own mounting soul-sickness, my yearning-sickness that prevents me from drinking and breathing. I am bound in place, straining against these ropes of fate while the whole world loses its colour.  I am no longer in the now.  I have moved to the place of transit, the neither-here-nor-there.  I no longer see the swallows and the doves.

Separation and the tolling of the bells

Each bell and each of the muezzins' daily prayers toll out my separation.  Each bell jars me and reminds me.  Nothing has changed and everything has changed.  Put up a block, a wall, a tower of stones, an erection of bricks, a mountain in my way.  Any thing of substance, a fence with barbed wire!  The blue day and happy bird song slaps me hard across my face and leaves me breathless.  Jerusalem of Gold is not here amongst the minnarets, golden domes and wailing walls, but in a shabby row of flats in west Auckland.

A last Shabbos?

Last night we joined the throngs at the kotel.  There was singing, dancing, the dis/harmony of a thousand prayers, crying babies and gossip, and the uncultured courting of the young.  It was a wild night and a good night.  But this night I did not sleep well on account of Eyjafjallajokull which is in fact an icelandic god rising angrily from beneath a frozen river of ice... He has spewed wrath into the skies and snapped our homeward bound journey in two.  ... I want to go home.  Eyjafjallajokull makes a mockery of the modern world, and all our systems and plans.  He puts us back an entire century!  In my dreams I imagined an overland journey to New Zealand via Afghanistan, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

I had a thought about the lover in the Song - a deer, a stag.  We saw an ibex stag/bull in En Gedi.  He was afraid of human beings.  He was high up the side of the wadi, kneeling in the shade of a small grotto in the limestone.  Probably waiting for sunset when he can come down and drink water in the falls, where all the greenery is, the garden.  Waiting for shadows.  Quick to flee, self-preservation, fear of the hunter.  C. saw him first and that is because he had a hunter's eye.  We only saw one.   I believe they are territorial.

Sheol dreams

I slept all night but in and out of nightmares.  Maybe it was the wind change, the fever that has clung to me since YadvaShem.  The warming weather.  The cool swim at En Gedi, and the hot walk high on the sides of the wadi.  I dreamed of a colourless world, trapped in the Lovers Cave, high in the wadi with the stone man.  I dreamed of cold, windswept mountains high up and near Syria.  I dreamed of cavernous dwelling places, and striped rough cotton cushions, rams horns, rocks piled into rows, and circles, chipped and broken mosaics.  All this whirled around me as I peered wildly out of the Dodim Cave guarded by the bearded semitic king carved into the cliff by the wind.  This morning I am exhausted as if I walked across the Negev in my sleep with the images of the Shoah walking with me, dread companions.  Tired and throbbing in my temples.  There were no crabs, conies, or ibex in these dreams, no doves, canaries, swallows.  No black ants, and no red dragonflies.

The cavern of love

We took a bus early this morning down to En Gedi.  We walked up to Nahal David and then took a rickety path up the steep side of the wadi to the Dodim Cave ... the cave of lovers!!!  A beautiful peaceful pool and cave high above the lower waterfalls with a view over the Dead Sea (which was crystal blue) and a stunning glimpse of the mountains of Jordan.  Shulamit spring, cave of love, peace.

The wisdom of the olive tree

Today we explored the botanical gardens walking to Nayot passed the myriad Jerusalem cafes aligning Derech Aza.  We saw the yellow green bark of the pistachio, the oak, the cypress, the olive, the balsam, the trees and flowers of the middle east and the mediteranean.  And then continued to Ein Kerem and visited Yad Vashem (Hand and Name... huge triangular holocaust memorial).  We saw it and came out of it with the setting sun over the Ya'ar Yerushalayim (forest of Jerusalem).  I can't say any more about the memorial and the images and stories and recountings, and what I saw, and heard and felt, the room of books full of names.  The images of children, the paintings, the journals, the ribbons from their clothes, the mothers holding their children, the tears, shoes, spectacles, emerald necklaces and the dark valley beyond tears.  And the faces that turned away, and the very few faces who turned towards and the very many more evil hands.  Some things can't be adequately written down.


And my shulamith, where is she.  At the bottom of a pit?  Transmuted into ash?  Emaciated, cradling her child at the last?

A museum of psalms (or) the halls of heaven

I think I saw God today in the form of a little old man with a long white beard and forelocks and fringes.  When I first saw him he was lying in his bed, in a bed sitter in the lower floor of a stone house.  The door into the dooryard was army green and almost off its hinge.  How could I have known the mysterious old man was the ancient painter who paints with magic fingers.  And could paint portals into space without changing his brush.  He has painted the whole world and even more of the universe in an old house with a broken courtyard in Rav Kook street in Jerusalem.  In fact when he showed me his paintings of the creation of the world I thought for a moment I was there.  And when I saw his Jerusalem, white and pure, and floating above the earth on a cloud of 600000 hebrew letters I also believed him, because of course I saw it with my eyes.  And I also thought I was in the courtyard of the halls of heaven because he had even painted what I had felt when I had read the psalm of the fishes and their paths in the sea, and the smallness of a man, and the womb from which he was brought forth.  He had even painted the holding of my breath and how I had wondered about it all on a spring day 7 years ago.  He had painted the music of heaven and how it dances off the corners of these stones and breezes across my face.  I hadn't known it until now.  And how love surges from the heart of the yod, blasting out and transforming into the colours of a rainbow.

Fancy finding the heart of heaven in a ramshackle and broken down house in Rav Kook Street Jerusalem.

Promethea, the Shoah, and pains of the heart

This morning I needed to read and think about the Song of Songs.  I got up but didn't want to go.  C. was sleeping.  The Sharuv winds had dissipated leaving cool winds from the north, from Hermon, from the Lebanon.  I got up to go but he said don't leave me... so I stayed a little longer... and then I left to go to Mamilla where I thought I could find a quiet warm spot in a cafe overlooking the garden quarter outside Jaffa gate.  I did.  And then I read Promethea, the last part where H. talks about love for Promethea, and the world with its bulls horns and heart moist like a river but torn together and apart.  Something in the womb I had constructed in the cafe made the words in Promethea intense and I felt every one this morning.  And then the sirens blasted and everything in the city stopped.  Stopped to remember the deaths of 6 million children, 6 million who once were children and now ash.  And every eye was touched with the pain of remembering and an old man stood in the cafe and cried.  And because at that moment I was already undone by Promethea, words on a page, a book, but a book of books, the siren and the eye unblinking and the silence and the blast and the stop pierced me and I felt entirely broken and in pain.  Which I can't understand because I'm too small.  My soul isn't pure enough for noble pain written down and the memory of the world.  I left the cafe and went to buy some stamps.  And the woman who I bought the stamps from offered me a phone card.  And I wanted to be sick because my heart was still in my throat and I couldnt breathe.

A sharuv and dragons in the Negev

Yesterday, the wind changed.  Everybody can tell dramatically if the wind changes here in Jerusalem.  The wind becomes hot, and then dust comes with the hot wind.  The dust brought by the wind covers the whole city.  You can barely see the sun.  It just becomes a dull glow in the sky.  You can't see the mount of olives or mt scopus, and barely mt moriah.  it is like a plague from egypt.  a demon from the desert.  which is where the wind comes from.  the hot, devouring mouth of the desert which is in the south east.  the negev.  a fire breathing dragon in the desert blows hot fumes on the city.

My Gargantuan Hermon, fierce beauty

I discovered a few things on our drive up to Tsafed and Hermon.  One, that the Shulamith could not see Hermon from Jerusalem, and two, she would have had to see the Hermon and the mountains of the north, the Lebanon to know how to use the right words, evoke the right imagery.  Mountains like Hermon are godlike, goddesslike.  We drove up the mountain where Tsafed nestles like a tibetan monastery, its so high, cold, clear.  The same afternoon we drove to Hermon, through Neve Ativ, and up through Magdal Shamms.  We pitched a tent at the side of Lake Ram.  It was clear, cool, still.  But over night she blinked her eyes and snorted her nose and there were gales, squalls, thick, dark clouds that seemed to slam into the mountain side.  She didnt move.  She was implacable and capricious.

Shulamith has this gargantuan capriciousness.  She is a mountain dweller, I could see why Zapphon, the north, the mountain, Hermon, lair of leopards is her home.  White face, storm priestess.  On the side of that mountain I felt like Moshe - small, terrified, as short-lived and insignificant as a butterfly.

Some brave soul carved out a fortress on the flanks of Hermon.  Nimrod castle, amazing construction of stone.  Not without some traces of beauty in its carving.  A decorative fountain, vaulted ceilings, the marmeluke lion. Sitting like a tick on a dog, still standing even though her caliphs have been reduced to dust... now the perpetual home of a tribe of coneys!!

Impromptu rubbish dumps and the trills of small birds

We walked from Nazareth to the Kinneret.  Beautiful hillside, important history, spiritual value ...  the stirring, pondering, meditations of the pilgrim jarred to the present with the trail being apparently used by the locals as a fair place to dump rubbish.  Apart from our constant horror at the desolation of the land by the 21st century, the trail from Nazareth to Sepphoris/Zippori to Cana, Arbel and Wadi Hammim was marvellous.  We lay under the cover of forest in Zippori, tented in the corner of a wheatfield near lavi, met wonderful people, were offered water, gave our water.  The views over the valleys, the ubiquitous birdsong.  Most extraordinary was the trail leading through the Horns of Hattin where a crusader vs saladin battle was fought and the cave fortresses of the rebels in the cliffs of Arbel.  Between the horns of hattin we, with our packs, and sore feet felt like hobbits on their journey through middle earth!!!

I imagined peace at the Galilee when we arrived but it was another jarring return to real time.  Tamar Beach, thumping disco tunes, drum battles on Wii, barking dogs, lights and booze...

Seders and Stations

What to say ... when too much speaking just sounds like a roar and achieves little!!  Who can work it out.  We are just sad.

Last night we went to a seder with a religious family.  The great grandmother (90 years old) told us she lost her whole family in Poland in the Shoah.  She stopped for a moment - grief still palpable.  The father spoke about survival and how Jewish people everywhere have always felt they had to fight to survive.  Any archaeological museum around here attests to that fact.  We ate and sang and tried to follow the Haggadah with the super fast Hebrew.  C. gallantly perservered through 3 hours of seder prayers (but his book did have pictures!!).  The mother was a translator and brought out her NJPS version of the Song in English.  It was interesting talking about the Song with religious people who speak Hebrew as a mother tongue.  Its completely different for them because the words are plain.  They read intuitively and comfortably where as I read speculatively, closely, complicatedly.  It was disconcerting.  I need to work harder on Hebrew but its an uphill, all- consuming commitment.

This morning we went down to the wall.  The men's praying section was awash with white prayer shawls and singing - all discordant - there appeared to be at least 5 shuls praying.  We walked down to Gethsemane (one of them) and revisited the 1000 year old olive trees.  We went up to the russian convent with the gold bell shaped spires.  very peaceful in there (you can tell its a woman's place).  There was a cave in the garden that they believe is Mary Magdalene's tomb.  Probably not, but it certainly once held a number of bodies.  All these churches seem to pivot around death - the dormition, the holy sepulchre.  I want to run back to those ever-living olive trees.  Ironically, the trees have lasted where people haven't.  I wondered if the kingdom on earth that creation groans for might involve no people at all.  There have been so many battles in Jerusalem.  I can't see peace when there is so many people with live-and-die-upon beliefs.  Peace may only descend when we all go away, when human civilization reaches its apogee and then fades away.  We visited Pharoah's daughter's tomb (its not but it has a pyramid so it was an easy connect), and Absalom's pillar (which apparently isn't) and is it Zechariah ben Jehoida's in between (or not)?  There are tombs and dank caves everywhere in this valley.  I wonder about death.  Seeing the tombs (?) of these biblical people (who seem to be still running with their beautiful long hair again and again in text) makes me confront my own mortality.  One life is a gasp, a breath.  Seeing the tomb challenges my fantasy with the text, the narrative.

We came back into the city via the Lion Gate.  It took us along the Via Dolorosa.  We saw the remnants of the crusaders, and the arch of Hadrian (Ecce Homo), we saw the ruins of the Antonia Fortress, huge cisterns, aquaducts, ancient canals, striated stone pathways.

Where is the Song?  She is buried underneath the rubble of a thousand conquerings, razings, and decimations.  She is entombed in rock, marked by plaques and pyramids.  She is a victim of grave robbers.  She is trodden upon by shield bearing legions.  She is prostrated upon by hordes that weep and clutch.  She is the holy grail of the middle east peace process continually smashed.  She is the 15 year old boy who died today on the Gaza Strip.  The two soldiers who will never hold their children.  She is a small, old woman who lost the entire world in 1939.

She has faded like Echo leaving only a whisper.

Madman at the wall

We walked through Hezekiah's tunnel yesterday.  I am always sorry half way through (I think the tunnelers made the height of the wall narrow on purpose!!!).  Its refreshing (after the abject terror of small dark spaces has passed) to wade through the water.  Its a womb-like space, dark, tight, and then a birthing experience.  Its a baptism/mikvah every time.  We walked barefoot and bare leg all the way.  I forget every time how scary it is, and probably because seeing the daylight at the end of the 500m walk entombed by rock is miraculous and wonderful.  We end up in the Gihon Spring.  And pass back via the Pools of Shiloach (Siloam).  In the wall of the cliff opposite we could see what remains of the tomb to Pharaoh's daughter.  All Songs-ish ... but I cant find her here.  Not really.  I dont think she ever existed, and excepting the fact that she exists all the time.

Maybe like Cixous' Promethea, she is my Shulamith.  She is the eery vestige spirit of peace in a land overwhelmed by cameras, guns, spies, suspicions.

We wound our way back into the old city via the dung gate.  We sat in the plaza by the kotel (western wall) as the sun set.  seemed like a wonderful meeting place, except the madman kept us all on our toes.  Funny old man shouting in hebrew about apocalypse and all sorts.  Shouting condemnation.  Giving everyone frights.  He refused to leave.  No one made him go.  The glass under the chuppah.

Raining in Jerusalem

Did I say it is raining?   Its pouring down.  Its unusual weather... and very cold.  We are in another little arab youth hostel down on St Marks road.  It is a maze of little arched stonework rooms.  Chan and I were booked to sleep on the roof, imagining it would be dry and pleasant.  After all, Jesus and his group sleep on the mt of olives this same night.  But after two nights on the roof the rain clouds came over and poured down.  Now we are sleeping in the cosy bohemian annexes behind the reception.  They have laid down arabesque cushions, mats, and wall hangings and they are very dark and colourful.  We slept so well last night.  So, we have another few days here and when the buses operate again after the first two holy days of pesach we will go up to Galilee for our ambitious walking adventure.  I am hoping that the open countryside of Galilee will provide the contrast I need from Jerusalem.  We will be camping in the fields above the lake.

Frankincense, myrrh and all the chief spices

We went walking around the old city today.  Its shabbat so everything is subdued.  We found coffee with cardamon and we are making it ourselves in a little enamel pot with a long handle.  We are almost through all our lovely foods from Mahane Yehuda.  I had thought we had bought plenty.  As we walked today towards the Damascus Gate we met an old arabian man who was selling spices for incense.  He sold us (probably for too much!!) a little bag full of frankincense, myrrh and another called something like zatar, and another called amber.  he was burning some in a little gold container.  it was sweet and sharp to smell.

you can't be a lover in this city.  there are too many people, too close, too frantic.  You have to go out to the wilderness to find some peace, to be alone... unless you are wealthy and can afford a garden, but even then, too close, too urban.

First Shabbat in Jerusalem

We have spent the last two days in Jerusalem.  We've walked all the way from the old city to the Israel Museum via the Mahane Yehuda market.  Ohh!!  wonderful market, busy, bustle, spices, eggplant, hummus, oils, all sorts.  Cheap, cheap!  I loved it.  We went back again today to buy for Shabbat.  Challah and wine.  We'll have a little Shabbat on the roof today and then go down to the kotel.

Where is the Shulamith?  I've seen date palms as tall as buildings.  I've seen and smelled the spices in towers in Mahane Yehuda.  I've trolled the Biblical lands museum (because the Israel Museum was closed!!!!) and seen the goddesses, and necklaces of lapis lazuli, and seals that are like totems, expressions, symbols of a person's nephesh!!  I've read a little of the Song at the Shrine of The  Book - in the Aleppo Codex. 

I've held C's hand in the via dolorosa and felt the stares of the sellers there...  where is she?

I've seen the daughters of Jerusalem at the kotel.  The daughters of Ishmael too above on the temple mount at the dome of the rock.  I've seen the wadi of David and its palms and greenery.

Where is she?  I want to see Lebanon, I want to see Gilead.  I have seen the Sheep Pools in the model of the city.

Yasser Arafat and the date palm

Today we wound up in the West Bank again.  Am I looking for Shulamith and have found the Palestinians??  We were in Jericho riding up to the Church of the Temptation of Christ with primary school boys and their teacher from Nablus.  They can never go to Jerusalem.  Its made me feel very sad.  And here we were in the middle of Ramallah at Yasser  Arafat's tomb near his offices where he was under seige.  Its been a strange day indeed.  Tired and troubled.  We saw the paintings on the wall in Ramallah.  Saw Edvard Munch's scream deconstructed for a new reading.

Saw date palms today. You know how tall they are.  Enormous.  Looked wistfully at Ein Gedi, Qumran, Masada.  Its been crazy.  We swam in the dead sea.  Ate oranges in Jericho, cried in Ramallah.  Saw Bedouins.

Brilliant.  Astounding.  Tragic.

Palestinian territories

We had intended to walk up the mount of olives but instead found ourselves in the West Bank.  Maybe there was tension in the air, there was certainly politics from our taxi driver but on this particular day there was blue sky and serenity over all the rolling hills.  We saw the church of the nativity and drank coffee in the market.  We walked the streets, many of the shops were closed up.  I guess there was evidence of deeper angst.  Busy day.  Tomorrow we go to Qumran.

Blue skies in Jerusalem

C. and I have flown 36 hours straight, lept onto a sharoot and zoomed up to Jerusalem.  We saw the golden city at dawn.  C. was spell bound.  We were virtually tossed out the back of the speeding sharoot at Jaffa Gate where we had the pleasure of finding our names on the door of our inn... welcoming us and informing us to go for a pleasant walk in the old city and come back at 12.  It was 6a.m.  We walked the long way from Jaffa Gate to Ben Yehuda street via a number of map reading errors.  We drank thick black coffee and tiny fresh croissants at 7 am while Ben Yehuda Street was just starting to unravel for the day.  We walked right round, passed the museum of psalms, passed Rev Kooks house, round the Russian enclave, the ethiopian mosiac church, stumbled into the police-idf compound, were tailed by security at the municipal buildings and finally we found our way without incident back to the old city.  C. is always getting pulled up!  Still with time to burn we walked to the kotel.  we payed our respects washed our hands, prayed our prayers, walked in stages and rocked and walked backwards without turning away.  we laid the little packet of prayer scrolls in the cracks, and prayed for all our loved ones.

It was still only 9am.  We lined in a massive queue and (with a little guilt ignored all rabbinate warnings about wandering on the temple mount).  We walked twice around the temple mount and al-aqsa mosque compounds until a taciturn worshipper told us our time was up.  We merged with norwegians and went through the golden gates.

Up and down and round and round we went through the arab quarter.  the spices, the silks, the scarves, the confronting gestures, catcalls - i'm much better this time round.  Maybe because I am all in black and 10 years older!!!  We found our way to a lauded hummous den - Abu Shiska at 10:30am and enjoyed an excellent arab humous and falafel with fresh orange juice and arabic coffee... mmm  I was in chick pea heaven.

We came back at 12 to check in and crash but found out we had to pay in cash so walked another hike to the mamilla mall.  Horrors - our credit card was not cooperating!!!  It took an hour of messing about to work it out.  And here I am - FINALLY a shower and in my little old city hostel (a pair of old fogeys with a bunch of teenage travellers) and loving every minute.  Still get mistaken for a Jerusalemite ... still feels like coming home.

Paris, Tel Aviv and Beijing

Rosebud tea, bare birch trees, camembert cheese - C. and I have come half way round the world to come back to Israel.  We went via Beijing and Paris.  We flew into Tel Aviv around midnight.  We could see the lights of the cities below all up and down the mediterranean coast line.  I'm wearing birkenstocks with pink-striped socks which made me the target of a search at Charles de Gaulle airport.  Well, I would search someone who is wearing socks with their birkenstocks!!

We are going up to Jerusalem soon and not sure what awaits us.  Its a real thing to locate Ancient Israel underneath this newly born country.  Neon signs, magazine covers, logos - its bizarre having spent the last 10 years only reading biblical hebrew.  I can understand why some resented the installation of Hebrew as the national language.   Its become wonderfully everyday.

I think our goals for the next two days (apart from recover) is to walk the streets of Jerusalem and try to find the ghost of the Singer.

I've brought Jacques Derrida, 'Writing and difference' along for the journey.  He has already said some interesting things about the imagination, beauty and intelligence.

Israel

C. and I are off to Israel.  Considering the current political situation going up to Jerusalem feels as dark and ominous as in the Song.  The dark streets of Jerusalem.

Irigaray. "The way of love" (New York, Continuum, 2002) trans. Bostik & Pluhacek

In Luce's preface to the english translation she defines (without defining) her mode of writing and how she sets her writing as 'discourse in real time'.  She is exemplifying philosophy in the feminine "where the values of intersubjectivity, of dialogue in difference, of attention to present life, in its concrete and sensible aspects ... raised to the level of wisdom" (viii-x).  She is in dialogue with Heidegger.

She finds for this project that "narrative and descriptive languages are no longer appropriate".  It is about making something "exist in the present and thus into the future".  She talks about "staging an encounter" between two who haven't yet meet in real time.  Through text we can do it.  "prepare a place of proximity".  I suppose it is drawing another being into yourself - Luce prepares the space within her.  That is gutsy territory ... but can be natural.  Don't women carries little life forms within them?  Luce meets in the womb ... in her own womb.  Drawing the discourse into the place which nurtures, begins, becomes, and births into the world.

She writes of four voices in her text.  Heideggers, her own, the reader, and her translators who shaped her words into language my mother spoke.  Its fascinating to think that I am one of her voices.  She includes me.  Once again I drawn, invited into a text in Luce's embrace - I have this opportunity to speak with her.