The first is mutation. No one knows what a human is. The limits of the human species are consequently unknown. They can, however, be felt. The mutant is extra-ordinary, bearing with it a new ordinary. This book is a process of mutants, physically perfect. It is a terrible process. It is advisable to fear this book.
There are, as I have said, three things that strike fear.
The second is Tradition, according to the spirit that moves where it breathes.
We all believe we know what Time is, but we suspect, with reason, that only Power knows what Time is: Tradition according to the Weft of Existence. This book is the history of Tradition, according to the spirit of the Remaining Life. Yet another reason for us not to take it seriously.
There are, I say for the last time, three things that strike fear.
The third is a bodywriting. Only those who pass through there understand what it is. And that it is of interest to no one.
Speaking and negotiating, producing and exploring, construct, in effect, the happenings of Power. Writing accompanies the density of the Remaining Life, of the Body’s Other Form, which, I tell you here is: Landscape.
Writing glimpses, it cannot be used to confine. Writing, as in this book, fatally brings Power to the loss of memory.
And who knows what a Body With A Hundred Absent Memories of Landscape is.
Who can bear Emptiness?
Perhaps No One, not even a Book.
A. Borges
Jodoigne, January 4, 1977
Place 1 —
in that place there was a woman who did not want to have children from her womb. She asked the men to bring her their wives’ children so she could educate them in a large house with only one room and only one window; she wore a black shawl close to her face; she had a distant way of making love: with her eyes and with her speech. Also with time, for since the days of her great-grandmother, going back to any era was always possible. Moving, she sometimes looked intently at a place the most beautiful in her house the whole house
because the whole house was beautiful and in that look began either the time of children, or the time of men. Women, there was no other, aside from her, never passed beyond the entrance, which led to the land, land with a garden where they could walk. The men were content because every time she said it isn’t you I care about, it’s the next. So they convinced themselves that, in the moment before, they had been the next. She sat in her room (everywhere) and picked up words on a lightly curved forefinger, as if she served herself an aperitif or a fish. She never thought that perhaps she was situated in the fragment of a cooled star or that she could, with a powerful plant, poison
but, there being no other woman in the house, there were many voices which, from different corners, all seemed to turn toward her
body and did not quiet when she spoke
there was a curtain in the window
which served as a place of spiritual retreat for the children who, at times, wished to leave for the woman, in turn, to receive new lovers there they copied the Ascent of Mount Carmel, by Saint John of the Cross, they laughed, they listened to the voice that slowly read what they had written and, in the end, even imitated their laughter you must know that a soul laughter must generally pass first through two nights that the mystics call purgations laughter or purifications of the soul and that we here will call nights laughter
because the soul walks as if at night, and in darkness; you must know that for these children this laughter did not signify derision; out of pure and extreme ignorance, other children invented that there was a chair in this room with torn stuffing where the sea could be heard, as soon as we put our ear there; now, the springs are damaged the housecat came in you live in the alternative of being a real cat or a royal object and the papers slipped to the ground without her caring: papers, children, lovers, there would always be Saint John of the Cross: when she stood up because a child called her to the locutory in the garden behind one of the house’s walls, she already knew the girl wanted to speak to her; she listened so raptly to what she revealed that, after two hours, she felt an ache in the nape of her neck and also in her skull; it seemed to her, as always when she spoke for a long time, that the words fell into her eyes, dilated and sunk them; the girl wanted an answer and she remembered that no precedents existed; despite this, she was going to think on it, to be with a few children and the papers, and perhaps Saint John of the Cross, whom she would find in any place.
Covered by the table and always ready to write, she dreamed about a group of men and Saint John of the Cross, discalced carmelite, sitting in front of an oven, roasting mutton; his forehead began to darken, red, between waves of scent; she understood, by the fixity of his expression, that he had entered the dark night and that either his book, or his hands, or his feet were now lying on the rack and they traversed flames and circumstances with unforeseeable results. And that he did not write: he had gathered his right fist inside his sleeve and because of the cloth’s transparency only the image
of those who asked for the prisoner to be received could be recognized; sleepreading in the chair, tobacco smoke rose between his fingers, while the woman twisted her bracelet on her wrist:
never again bring me a message that doesn’t know how to tell me what I want. The door closed with a soft
disturbance of air
which agitated the scarf
which wrote to look for the book; a short phrase, once found, was lost again; she raised her hand to ask a question, already forgotten; they looked in opposite directions, the question arose in the woman in the form of a smile; she hesitated on the s, as if she were going to write Saint; from the canonized body of Saint John of the Cross rose smoke and the question, the girl’s sweet fire. He lay his hair against the back of the chair, looking up, and when he distinguished ahead he tapped his fingers through a long path of obscure contemplation and aridity; he had to go through many lines until he found it in the middle of the page after a horizontal white space that seemed another margin there on the page.
Place 2 —
“that you pierce the substance of my soul so intimately and tenderly and glorify it with your glorious ardor so that from now on, in your great kindness, you show me how much you wish to give yourself to me as in eternal life; if, before, my prayers did not reach you — when with the anxieties and exhaustions of love in which my spirit and my feeling suffered
My name is Ana del Mercado y Peñalosa. When I go out, I tie a velvet ribbon around my neck. I am hopelessly devoted to writing (and to disappearing in writing) I do not like to read. I like to listen to music as if I myself had written it.
From this day forward, I can no longer separate reading from writing; (if I could see the text being produced, I would return to reading once again).
I was born in Segovia where I have many possessions, I was widowed by Don Juan de Guevara.
Undressed, I pick up the deck because of my cowardice and my great impurity and the weakness of my love, I asked you to kidnap me and take me with you as my soul ardently wished it because the impatience of love did not allow me to conform myself to the conditions of life in which you still want me to live, for some time yet; and, if the old forays of love, lacking the necessary quality to attain the effects of my desire, were not sufficient, now, when I feel so strong in love that not only do my spirit and senses not grow weary in you, but, to the contrary, my heart and flesh rejoice in the living God sustained by You in a great conformity of both parts of cards that I put on one of my knees and say diamonds or spades, red or black. If it’s diamonds or hearts I will make love immediately. If it’s spades or clubs I must wait five minutes looking intensely at an object that I myself choose, which could be a pillow, a lamp, a portrait, or one of the bouquets of flowers replaced every day by one of the tallest children who will succeed me indeterminately.