by Joanna Walsh
Is there magic in words? Could I influence you subliminally by repeating these liminal words that do no more than trace your limits? If I keep on loving you, saying so, what will happen to us? Probably very little, as very little appears to happen in love, and the less love, the more there is to say about it.
Maybe one day we will see each other again, I mean not across a screen but face-to-face, for what that’s worth, and he might even ask me if I wrote this book about him, and I will have to say no. I would have to say no, I never loved you, not like the person in the book. Because of this book I will have to deny him In Real Life. People must be protected from words, or more words must be wrapped around to cushion them, until the truth, which words aim at, slips from between the pages, goes somewhere else altogether.
No, words cannot bring anything into being. What’s the use in going on? If I keep on writing… but you can’t say everything, not in one book. Writing’s medium is time, and love’s too – and reading! – but love is also the texture of its communication, not just virtual, I mean hair, skin, clothes, touch at close quarters. I dreamt about his coat in Nice, and there was someone else in it. But I could still feel that it was his. Those ghost exteriors were the last things to go. And I’d thought love was noumenal.
What I have learned is very simple. But learning it has been so very complicated. I have travelled this far only so I can say this: arriving early, I killed time, made myself up in a shop in the station, wiped it off again. It was important that I would not have been sitting for too long, although I knew that I would arrive first, and would be happy for him to find me waiting. Love like hope, though – no – nothing is so like anything else that I can use words to compare one thing to another. So there they were. She was sitting on stone steps outside a station, reading a book. She was in place. He arrived (late), we kissed. Look at us from the outside and we’re beautiful.
I refuse to finish this book.
There is no end to love.
Now, where were we?
Acknowledgements and permissions
Thanks to Stephen, for the maths, and everything else.
Early or abridged versions of some chapters have appeared in the following publications:
Ventimiglia and Athens: Granta, 2013 and 2014 Rome: The Night Museum Guidebook (Museum of London, 2016) Vol de Nuit: Airplane Reading (Zero Books, 2016) Amsterdam: E.R.O.S. (Eros Press, 2016)
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders of quoted material. The author and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to quote:
Notting Hill Editions for Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary, translated by Richard Howard (2011).
Semiotext(e) (2006) and Tuskar Rock (2015) for Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick.
Flammarion (2009) and Serpent’s Tail (2012) for Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love, translated by Peter Bush.
Nebraska Press/Bison Books for André Breton’s Mad Love, translated by Mary Ann Caws (1988).
Penguin Books for André Breton’s Nadja, translated by Richard Howard (1999).
Gallimard for Je suis comme je suis (extracts), in Jacques Prévert’s Paroles (2016).
Semiotext(e) for Chris Kraus’s Aliens & Anorexia (2000).
Semiotext(e) for Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, translated by Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss and Paul Patton (1983).
Ginkgo Press for Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage (2008).
University of Illinois Press for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 1988).
Bloomsbury Publishing for Anne Carson’s ‘The Gender of Sound’ in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (2004).
Writers House for Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, translated by Harry Zorn (Pimlico, 1999).
Indiana University Press (2001) and Verlag Klostermann for Martin Heidegger’s The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker.
Dalkey Archive Press for Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2006).
Penguin Books for Susan Sontag’s As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh (2013).
Duke University Press for Denise Riley’s Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005).
Ishi Press for Albert Speer’s Spandau: The Secret Diaries, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (2010).
Taylor & Francis and Chicago University Press for Simon Bell’s Landscape: Pattern, Perception and Process (Routledge, 2012).
Cambridge University Press for Immanuel Kant’s ‘Analytic of Principles’ in Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (1999).
Penguin Books for On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia by Sigmund Freud, translated by Shaun Whiteside. Original German text copyright © Imago Publishing Co Ltd, 1940, 1946, 1950. Translation and editorial matter copyright © Shaun Whiteside, 2005.
Faber & Faber for Philip Larkin’s ‘Wild Oats’ in The Whitsun Weddings (2016).
The Adorno Archive for ‘On Popular Music’ in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, New York Institute of Social Research, 9 (1941).
WW Norton & Company Inc. for Jacques Lacan’s ‘Encore’ in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, translated by Bruce Fink (1999).
MIT Press for Sherry Turkle’s Evocative Objects (2007).
University of Chicago Press for Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1968).
Taylor & Francis (2001) and Chicago University Press (1978) for Jacques Derrida’s ‘Structure, Sign and Play’ in Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass.
GB Agency for Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality Vol. 3, translated by Robert Hurley (Vintage, 1988).
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