Above

There are necessary writers, closer to you in some way than yourself. That you confront them in your solitude, there where only you should be. And that you cannot speak of, not ordinarily. You lack the means. How can you speak of what allows you to speak? How to separate their rhythm from your own – their style from what passes as your own (your own and what is least your own. Nietzsche knew this when he signed his work Dionysos, or the Crucified. Because to write, to speak, is to do so with a million voices.)

Style – and that is the word. Style, stylus – written across you. Within you, so that what you find in your solitude belongs outside of you. Written within the writing that you are. There, on the bookshelf – there in that author, or that one. Or in that book which you bought – when?; which was given to you … by whom? Here is Tsvetayeva: ‘It is always the same me that does not come toward the same self that is waiting for it, always’. Marina Tsvetayeva: one of the necessary writers for me.

Laughter: but you can’t read Russian. Laughter: you only have her work as it’s quoted by others. And it is her letters – scraps of letters, quoted – that you love, and not her poems. Isn’t it? Isn’t it? It is as if I want first of all the evidence of writing in a life. A writing that evidences writing, that testifies to what it has meant, to its risks, its dangers.

Tsvetayeva abandoned herself to writing, I want to write that. In some way, she abandoned herself to it. And now I remember the anecdote from quotation Mandelstam about M.T.’s rudeness … she was a tyrant, wasn’t she? She was half-mad, wasn’t she? M.T.: but when I abbreviate her name thus there’s something else I discover: that she is also more than the one Nadezhda Mandelstam met. More and other, beyond. As though, to remember the quotation again, one only meets her above, looking upward …

I do not like meetings in real life. Foreheads knocking together. Two walls. You just cannot penetrate. A meeting should be an arch. Then the meeting is above. Foreheads tilted back!