Substitution

The first ‘no’ from which all negation comes. The first ‘absence’ from which absence arrives. Speak, and you can lift the world from the world. But now you have words, rather than the world – words, which can function in the absence of this or any other world. Words: there will always be someone there to read them.

Still, for all that, something is lost. The price of mediation is the immediate, and how can you buy it back, you whose very being it is to lift the world from the world? Impossible to speak of the first ‘no’, the first ‘absence’, when we are condemned to speak, to write, to know the world via those symbols which have already lifted it from itself.

Unless there is an experience – impossible experience – in which this ‘no’ returns. Experience of the condition of experience, as it reveals the possibility of negation, of absence, which allows language to speak. No return – no reaching upstream to a world before language. But an interruption of language in language – an interruption of the power and possibility of speech.

Is this what happens before the dying one? Absence in person. Death in person: who are you, before the dying? What is left of you? Impossible one, dying has left something of itself in you. Impossible one, death has left its sting inside you. Death will die. But in you, who are so stung, death is joined to life.

Strange this substitution, in which dying crosses from one body to another. To speak of language, of the operation of language, is always to metaphorise, to leave the figure, the immediate behind. But such substitution is the return of the immediate, the most close, the most distant, the death that is impossible to die.

Now metaphor is crushed by what they cannot bear.  Relieve me from this burden, this dying that affirms the ‘no’ in my place. Relieve me, death, from this dying in life, from a burden greater than my death, which would only be a blessed relief.