The thing came at me in this precise way: As the face — the face on a small body perhaps. As the small body falls from the arms. Face first into snow. Snow that is red. This is the face of Lévinas and as such your language without a philosophy of hunger is incomplete. Without a philosophy of touch. Without a philosophy of greed. And so on. The face of Lévinas appears as two eyes commanding murder and fragility.
Touch what wants touching and you will break alongside the thing you would hold if in your language there were moments for breath and the capacity to yearn. Lévinas is not your language.
And you have yet to speak.
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Leaving. Not so much as having.
You wish yourself out of arms’ reach the way you wish yourself out of your city. There is logic in bereavement, but decry worship. The way your city was thrust from your thigh and what was wine ran like night through bone that is implacable. The night sky is cock-hard moving over you. And water on your tongue is nothing like fire, but dirt.
This theology bears the weight of every untraceable sadness.
What your language touches moves. What moves beckons murder. And what is murdered scratches a worn whisper onto all of the faces.
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Geography is conversion. A measure for what is lost.
We were looking up at ourselves.
With our texts full of faces and our hands like water getting into everything.
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Do you know the word broyer?
As with stone or chicken gut.
In it is the turbine with its axle and teeth. Death count. Or le cri. Broyer as with centuries, or meat. Broyer as with morality.
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A garden beneath a darkening sky.
A dog heavily. Lévinas cries out, why wouldn’t he?
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Geography is perversion.
Lyon, 1987: Klaus Barbie’s name is on la place publique and in so many mouths. Like this against a French tonsil and chattering teeth. Summer is the dismantled scaffolding of the Palais de Justice. This is as time reconstitutes itself. For Klaus Barbie it is always summer. Even with the heat he does not weep. He smiles for the camera. And the little girl who is eighty-one. All this time his hair grew and saliva wet his tongue. What is relevant is not memory but its absence. Is not habit but its betrayal. Is not innovation but humility. Is not love but anguish. Is not literature but history. Is not language but sediment. Is not amnesty. Is grievous. Is grievous. Is grievous.
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Communion is cannibalism.
Steiner’s century is closed to further inspection and our books are little else than capsules of complacency. An upheld hand is a shield for the face an admonishment a plea at times and often threatening. Une menace.
The hand of Amichai is shattered bone and Darwish with him laps water from cups of stone.