Consolation of writing: to return to the page over which I would be the master. The last word is mine, I could say; I keep the right to the last word. But what if it is only that writing is driven into writing itself; in which, rather than enacting a kind of revenge on the world, writing revenges itself against me, who would have turned to it after the fact?
No longer is writing belated; I do not keep the last word, but writing keeps it for me. The last word? No: one which erodes all words from within – which attenuates, by stretching it beyond its limit and beyond all limits, the possibility of preserving anything by writing. What is kept by way of writing? What lets itself be kept? No longer anything that is possible for me.
The last word: impossible writing which is only the etiolation of writing. Writing blanched, writing on writing like the silk on silk rugs I saw in the Kashmiri shop which shimmered as though possessed of a life that was more than that of the intricacies, the details of its weaving even as it was no more than those intricacies, the patient work of weeks and months.
The last word: cancer of language, devourer of stars, it is you who turn at the heart of light and around whom the day whirls like water to the plughole. To speak is not to see, says Foucault. It is only with cancered eyes that I can see the shimmering of language.
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