<eyebeam><blast> Broken Text on Exile

[Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>]

Broken Text on Exile


(I always regret. Is there anything else?)

Shall I, now, almost about to leave Japan, within another two weeks,
begin already to speak of exile, this body robbed from myself, not my
own, or doubling homes or vacancies? What happens in the process of
cauterization, displacements from which one slides into the flesh or
skull of another? Home or nation or _name?_ What are the bones or
processes of bones in this maternal safety, as if exile were an addic-
tion, a drug, as if there were a _gathering_ of sorts, a coalescence,
around this one word, _Japan_? (What if there were no word? What if the
maternal is nothing more than the comfort of ignorance?)

When the source has been named, the source has been created; the future
anterior always already, _naturally_ rules in this domain. From that
which springs from the source, call it totality. From what surrounds
source, call it surface or skin; call it borderline or mirror or sheen. 

That one no longer recognizes attributions, or rather their glissando
into and through the throat. That there are impediments, holes, traps
for the wary and unwary traveler (the unwary who glides down _in an
instant_ and with less affect). 

That the doubling itself is always already incomplete, springing from
that which is naming the source, which is rubbed raw by the nub of it or
displaced. 

Now, the night before leaving:

That endocolonization always plays a role, Gaston Miron's vacuity from
within for example, or the exigencies of peripheral vision. The great
fear that there is nothing to return to. The fear that one can no longer
speak, that speech has been robbed. The fear that one operates from the
cliff or hinge, that the cliff or hinge is a knife or tool of
cauterization.

The fear that this is too familiar a state, that one has always already
been in exile, strangers to ourselves, located on grids of others'
construction. The fear that the body no longer harbors liquid, that the
body is drained, absent, that there is no shape taken but one's own.
That the skin carries the scars of its own history. That the mind is
broken, that kanji-signs replace the imminence of knowledge; that they
do this forever.

That one enters an unfathomable darkness, that the darkness, like
depression is the last residue of truth. That it can't be _read._

I will not (the night after arriving)


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