Superficial Contact
[part 4 of Contact, Candle, Ampersand (2025)]
It is quite obvious that every communication, every exchange of words presupposes the necessary existence of a repertory of linguistic resources that have an identical value for all the participants.
Roman Jakobson
At the low door-frame, on the night of salt, our greatest wish was to become a landscape. The air between our foreheads had grown too coarse, too dissonant— the clouds of analogy too thick to pass through. In this absence of a repertory, we hoped and hoped for what was absolutely material— How blissful to be a landscape! This landscape for the painting whose first brush-stroke never takes place! And yet, here we were at the source of the phenomenon— refusing to be in the picture with the scents and streams—
Language is not the exchange of equivalent values in a field. Language is a slight brushing of the backs of hands followed by a period of dancing; language is when something fast and tacit streams through the screen door and at once we are beings but not images of ourselves. And absolved thus of the image of ourselves, absolved of the solipsism of a single particular image, the afternoon is exactly the afternoon exactly. The ends of the afternoon. At the end of the afternoon there is milk and there is the setting of the table, a terrific movement of opening and closing; there is the order of adjectives draping and dripping and falling off our shoulders. There are songs we play at parties; there are perfumes from statements from manuscripts which evaporate and then affix themselves to the ottoman. So roughly this was how it took place: every color merged and held fast to the postulate, each scene as rapt or as abundant as the seeing. (A brief bright light interpreted as the glint of something.) Yesterday Eli screened the Godard movie Vivre Sa Vie, and I sat at the back near Bella’s shoe and the print had subtitles in white so that they were often impossible to make out. (At the end of the afternoon there is the rubbing of eyes; there is the sulfur and the cellular.) In a restaurant the tragic heroine asks the philosopher why she can’t simply live without speaking— We constantly pass between silence and words as from life to resurrection, he answers. The heater’s pitch remains constant but its oscillation’s speed sometimes varies: now two beats per second, now one and three-quarters. I am not able to write until there is no question of an abyss between thought and condition. It is very much like being dared to sing. Back in the apartment, she asks: What shall we do today? Only the cover is cast aside. The lover can be heard reading Poe verses but his face stays perfectly still.
Of course, what confuses us is the uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet them in script and print. [...] It is like looking into the cabin of a locomotive. We see handles all looking more or less alike. (Naturally, since they are all supposed to be handled.) But one is the handle of a crank which can be moved continuously (it regulates the opening of a valve); another is the handle of a switch, which has only two effective positions, it is either off or on; a third is the handle of a brake-lever, the harder one pulls on it, the harder it brakes…
Ludwig Wittgenstein
It is like the walk from your front door. It is
Very much like being handed an instrument.
This day of ours, which is not composed
Of sentences but is alight with them,
With colors too, here opening
A concept, here opening the stir
From nervous passageways and, elsewhere,
A craving for a theory. It is like
A particle, and it is like a wave.
It is friends who drive like boys;
Peals of the next exit, taste, embraced;
Handles looking more or less alike.
So, thank you to the picture of an edifice
To crawl around in, measured-out and
Venerable atop the raging surf.
Thank you, good night. And to the picture
Of outside with talons, inside with garlands,
Pieces of fruit— the picture which,
In its craving for exactitude,
Has spread itself across the cranks and pulls
Into a flat ontology, a sea-floor,
Banished from its own dream
Of presence— Good night. Ta-ta to the hatred
Of tropes and trochees, semblance to resemblance,
Good-bye. Our meters have run out and
We have all begun to put on our hats, at peace
With the poem that stays in a glance, and with
The occasional bout of silence to signal
Something charged. All I want now
Is every leaf, and people in my life to brush my hair.
…the world-symbolism of music cannot be exhaustively interpreted through language, because it [...] symbolizes a sphere beyond and prior to all phenomena. In comparison with this, all phenomena are mere symbols: hence language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never uncover the innermost core of music but, once it attempts to imitate music, always remains in superficial contact with it, and no amount of lyrical eloquence can bring its deepest meaning a step closer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
In the morning there is meaning. The perfectly buttery articulation is nowhere but in its ends and details: I undergo the image and return to bed, all kinds of stuff speaking all over the place. In this state of affairs, having not already become the harshly visible analogues of ourselves, punched into an idea and thought about accordingly, the moment finds time for its depth and its resonance; eyes curve down to the object; the whole world a flicker, now something strong and something general, now a kind of liquid blue-gray. And we never risk becoming the Signified. We discard the faith in an innermost core, a deepest meaning. We replace it with an abundance of cores in every direction; cores which are also surfaces, and whose depths flare their twitching signals from all fields… all pots and pans, the wood windowsill, several songs. Rhythm and incident.
Now, words are not the symbols of phenomena— they are new and further phenomena, which are themselves not the symbol of any fixed picture of the prior, but enchanted with the mysterious and tactile and unassimilable force of our now. The lights that bob on the water meet each other both in our silence and in our words— in our silence and in our words they meet soap and trust and terror, in this now which is a future of always unrepeatable repetitions. Everything prolific, in excess of its origin. The metaphor ceases to be a machine by which the thing becomes the not-thing… It begins again with a sonority of particularities encountering other particularities; one never swallowing the other but each continuing its orbit, singing and actually immanent, like phone-lines in summer. If there is something which cannot be contained by words, it is because words do not contain. And they do not ring out from a chamber estranged from anything whatever— nothing penetrated or held at length. Nothing missing. Superficial contact: if there is something which cannot be contained by words, it is also what pulses through the words we continue to whistle, carefully, remarkably, into and out of each other… Yes, if there is something inexpressible in your chest when we are among the phlox, it is also there, still inexpressible, in the unmistakably intimate act of remembering what you said to me, days later, when I am alone.
You are moving, You never stay still. You never stay. You never “are.” How can I say you, who are always other? How can I speak you, who remain in a flux that never congeals or solidifies?
Luce Irigaray
Remove “say.”
Remove “are.”
Feel and regain them: Is the first all
Silver? Alight in perfect things— How can I say you
To the city? How can I say
You to the city? No less alight
in perfect things. No less a brief bright light.
Interpret it as the glint of something.
This second seems the perfect thing—
But here we almost place a substratum.
The congealed and the solid regained,
Final and finally symphonic. Yet—
No less a light than a listening. A tremendous habit of the universe
From each wall of your apartment: this and therefore not this.
How can I speak you—
The question to be so simply dissolved.
A small jar.
Ten small jars.
We could not reach the final object of knowledge without the dissolution of knowledge, which aims to reduce its object to the condition of subordinated and managed things.
Georges Bataille
What moves me the most is that what I cannot see nonetheless exists.
Clarice Lispector
What is it that we are still here? That under the first night we cannot run anymore— Senses brim sublime, now carrying around the secret which we cannot access, now Tossing it back and forth. At certain points in the imbrication, for a split second, Every frog falls silent. Variables continuously map their own movements: Now with screams or laughter, now with waltz-counts, a million CD copies of Das Lied Von Der Erde, smashed-up limes, lemons, and strawberries reflecting along the curb. I’ll tell you what happened, but you’re gonna want to lie down. (Ours was a relation Of listening in the barest sense. Ours was a relation of serious touch, not a gaze directed…) And how else? This is no great mystery, no cunning trick. The horizon was already pressed Into any refrain silence might have suggested to us both, the metaphor collapsed entirely into The air in our face as we step outside. How charming! To disperse and let time, gravity, Or mud do the talking, excused of being because excused of narration— yet these outflows Are not, and were never, the promise of an oceanic life. The day is tender and I write. What is it to acknowledge what never becomes a thought, What cannot be described but still moves and causes movement Within the description— the opaque moment that alleviates our opacity? What is it that things change me? The day is writing and I write.
…the materiality of the signifier [...] implies that there can be no reference to a pure materiality except via materiality.
Judith Butler
And how we'd wished to live in the sensual world.
Kate Bush
Material:
sheet over our fingernails.
Symbolic:
a periodic table of movements and touches. a caress
is three notes of a melody that will resolve with the dawn.
Material:
ether-waves and your anger.
don’t say it if it’s not what’s going on.
Symbolic:
After a prolonged business of freezings and
thawings, he got off the train and returned quietly to the
other question. The dozens of cards had been dealt, the
signs and the situations foreclosed, and behind his eyelids,
a huge swinging motion like a hammock in a windstorm.
The walk was long but he could see the stars much better if
he looked away from them. He was asked for a light but did
not have one.
Material:
More styrofoam cups of coffee with cream today,
more resting of our bodies upon the variegated cushions of
one another’s thought—- which is the effect
and the origin of our delight,
and so we are delighted.
Not a surrender or exchange; a simple mineral amplitude.
Symbolic:
Surrender and exchange form a system by which all
writing is an epitaph and all sense a negation of the
sensitive. Ships continue passing.
Material:
And how we’d wished for our lives to imitate this
matter— for one side of the arbitrary divide to freeze and fill
the other.
And how we’d wished to open a pomegranate
without one seed bursting, or better, to write a poem
without the name of any fruit or flower,—
Symbolic:
snow falls so slow. the small glass jar casts a long
shadow on the counter. no pouring of coffee beans and no
wrapped roses. another pinch of salt.
Material:
your eyes meet mine.
Symbolic:
snow falls so slow. the small glass jar casts a long
shadow on the counter. no pouring of coffee beans and no
wrapped roses. another pinch of salt.
Symbolic:
and it is one year and eighteen days since the
complicated story that held us parallel snapped into two
and flew apart. It was an earthen spring and it was a
quavering, tangled-up story; it was narrated in opposing
timbres, liable to be imagined as snarled or gaseous
wherever its maps grew too distant from our feet on the
asphalt. The story calcified our every sunset, our every
bus-ride and every meeting of our eyes from across the
party, with a symbolic density that terrified us, all of it
ringing out with familiar facts and follicles. It is like trying
to see one’s hand through a thick fog. But we kissed each
other’s thoughts goodbye, and the stream continued in
halves, now weaving into the sheer facticity of aquariums
and airports— (and so many sentences—) now resolving
each instant into the actual sweetness and dissonance of
itself.
Material:
The origin of language was no promise or
providence, because language was the origin of the origin.
And so the same arrangement gives us the seasons, any
tragedy of the tactile, things we hear about from people in
our lives.
Symbolic:
and your eyes meet mine.
Material:
The origin of language is the earthen spring that
collects you, the liquids that arrive atop the proposition.
The origin of language takes place when the sun
outside makes the window appear totally opaque,
unbounded by relation of with-ness alone.
Material:
he was asked for a light but did not have one.
Material:
softly each other’s objects, and so softly the
propositions that arrive atop the proposition, the candle and
the ampersand. here is where we wait for an origin of the
other answer.
A proposition is a queer thing!
Ludwig Wittgenstein
if the volume of a soluble afternoon,
if an empty cup, an existent particular asking,
if the whirring is to be intuited through what is epidermal and alone,
and alone and softer, softer directions, refractions, as the saccharine
and the ridiculous dissolve, if another snow so late
in the season of evenings, making wheat wilt and
every sound a swallow— every sound after all being public,
sensed, and tenseless, so stop me if you’ve heard this one.
if when i meet an old friend, a figurative painter,
he spills out half his coffee on the saucer,
if the view of the mirror is obstructed by violet cloths
even after the grandeur takes place, are bodies
our bodies even in the exhilaration of a new
and better loneliness. if you tell me exactly how he said it.
if it is not like a photograph but like the song in the back
of one’s mind when they pose for one, and if the door
was all set to close with vivid certainty, because i still had
a couple of dollars and it was almost the final act,
if the skin was the locus of contact and not the blockade,
and there was no blockade, only exactly how he said it.
only you exactly in the perimeter of a voluble afternoon.
if only you left every door and airway open, because
how you wished to live the life of non-assertion,
to only have one object in view, (the girl slicing bread,)
and infinite significant recognitions from there to the orbit of touch,
the asymmetrical touch of a che vuoi? from various friends,
or of an animal in shallow water, answering,
answering what still could not be asked.
Words are sounds transfused with unequal shadows that intersect, stalactites, lace, transfigured organ music.
Clarice Lispector
In the beginning there was the freezing of windows, cafes and tennis players. In the beginning there was the morning you take me swimming, a gentle and bow-like movement before a great length of silence. Semblance and ecstasy. From the beginning, no matter how quiet my feet on the rug, you would wake up when I moved over to the dresser.
* * *
The gerund is the body of the basket: in the beginning there was the body. And all kinds of uncertainties rushing in from all kinds of desires and situations… uncertainties we must resist hammering into structures which encase us in a metaphysics of anxiety, a metaphysics of impossibility, until one foot cannot go in front of the other. Pick up the phone and answer, Speaking. Pour yourself into the word.
* * *
It’s evening now inside, and the reflection of fluorescent light atop the blue-cold looks the way it sounds in novels. Everywhere else is just here. And we do not wish to learn how to sit in that silence of the novel, nor that of last April, and we do not wish to learn how to wake from the same sleep as our ancestors. We wish only to listen for the instants in our lives which merit a couplet or a touch on the shoulder. Everywhere else begins.