Froth

I know to what kind of writing I aspire: the text I would write would outwardly seem thematically disconnected, but would have a strong rhythmical coherence, carrying the reader from one point to the next, from one image or association to another. Ah to keep the reader’s interest whilst all the while spreading as it were beneath the text a great and simple movement. On the surface of the text, all would be motion like the froth on the waves; beneath it, stiller, there would be the simplicity of a body that rests in itself, virtually unmoving. From this depth would steadiness of wisdom reach the upper waters. From this depth and this silence, the incidents of the text would as it were well upwards, bearing the reader, laying claim to her interest.

The dream: my life – what I remember of my life – would be the substance of this text. Not because I would write personally or autobiographically, but because it is through the recounting of ostensibly personal details that I dream a kind of impersonality might bubble upwards from the depths. As though the details that would comprise my account would thin our and stretch, dispersing as an oil film over water. Welling up, breaking up the film, the particularites of my life would give way to a life: life lived by anyone today, at least in our world, and then life lived anywhere, everywhere, and then non-human life and non-organic life, then the opening of the world as becoming.