Nothing Began

'There is a kind of exhaustion which reaches the limits of strength. A limitless limit', the poet says, 'because it never quite comes to an end, and this is its trial. The exhausted one cannot ask when exhaustion will end'.

Ill, unemployed, how can he conceive of the end of exhaustion? In the end, he was made of it, exhaustion; he was nothing apart from it. He was simply exhaustion thickened up; tiredness living a human life.

'That was my life. That was what was left of me. I could not begin. And that's what I lived, this non-beginning. Nothing, in my flat, rose above its own ruin. Nothing began that did not also bring with it the impossibility of beginning, that was not also thickened by it, encumbered.

'Nothing was finished. Nothing began. And this is the secret', the poet says. 'It hasn't happened yet, what did so back there. It isn't finished. Do you understand that? Can you understand what I mean?

'Ann. The river. Jackson's Boat. It never really happened', the poet says. 'None of it. Not that it is fictional, or that I'm lying to you, but that – it was never finished. It was never rounded off. It wasn't allowed to happen, the poet says. It wasn't supposed to.

'And today? Now? There is no "today". No "now". Is that your role, the poet wonders, 'to bring it to an end? To write it up, our interview, and let it live for the first time? To let me live?' He fell asleep, the poet says. He fell asleep in life. And am I going to wake him up?'