" Sometimes I would sit at the machine for hours without writing a line.
Fired by an idea, often an irrelevant one, my thoughts would come too fast to be transcribed. I would be dragged along at a gallop, like a stricken warrior tied to his chariot.
On the wall at my right there were all sorts of memoranda tacked up: a long list of words, words that bewitched me and which I intended to drag in by the scalp if necessary; reproductions of paintings, by Uccello, della Francesca, Breughel, Giotto, Memling; titles of books from which I mean to deftly lift passages; phrases filched from my favorite authors, not to quote but to remind me how to twist things occasionally; for ex:
The worm that would gnaw her bladder or the pulp which had deglutinized behind his forehead. In the Bible were slips of paper to indicate where gems were to be found. The Bible was a veritable diamond mine. Every time I looked up a passage I became intoxicated.
In the dictionary were place marks for lists of one kind or another: flowers, birds, trees, reptiles, gems, poisons, and so on. In short, I had fortified myself with a complete arsenal.
But what was the result? Pondering over a word like praxis, for example, or pleroma, my mind would wander like a drunken wasp. I might end up in a desperate struggle to recall the name of that Russian composer, the mystic, or Theosophist, who had left unfinished his greatest work. The one of whom some one had written -He, the messiah in his own imagination, who had dreamed of leading mankind toward 'the last festival', who had imagined himself God, and everything, including himself, his own creation, who had dreamed by the force of his tones to overthrow the universe, died of a pimple."
Henry Miller, Nexus, Chapter 13
Reply to a certain reader who will recognise himself.
Some of the texts and illustrations published in French on this blog (which, owing to my very limited means, I have translated into English and Portuguese by an AI) originate in writings sometimes produced under quite different circumstances. The quotations accompanying them are chosen not only for the connections that might be drawn between them, but also for what may result from reading them… whether on the part of the reader… or of the author.
This clarification should help explain the precise function of these quotations. They are not merely epigraphs selected because they retrospectively illuminate an already completed text. They are introduced into an arrangement in which they may, in turn, act upon what follows them… Upon the person who writes as much as upon the person who reads.
This becomes particularly evident with Blanchot and the birth of Sang Chaud. The quotation tells us that the writer discovers “that he is spoken more than he speaks”. Then Don Carotte believes he is creating his companion, chooses his name, and immediately declares: “I am your author, am I not?”… only for this barely begotten companion to reply that he does not belong to him “not… or no longer”. Language seems to have taken advantage of its own invention to bring back a literary memory that precedes it.
The quotation is no longer an authority placed above the text to tell it what it means. It becomes almost an experimental condition. By bringing together two kinds of material that were not necessarily destined to meet — Blanchot and Don Carotte, for example, Clarice Lispector and Igniatius, St Augustine and the parrots, and so forth — one can observe what their proximity brings into being.
The author hopes that this may alter the customary chronology of the epigraph. Ordinarily, one imagines: I have written my text… I find a quotation that corresponds to it, and I place it at the beginning.
Here, among other possibilities, the movement may also become circular: a text calls forth a quotation → the quotation shifts the text, however slightly → this displacement brings to light something that might not otherwise have been perceived → this discovery transforms the author’s own reading of his text → and the reader, in turn, may then bring about a further displacement.
The quotation, then, no longer merely comments on what has been written. It enters into the writing itself.
This connects with what Félix and the parrots say about impression and expression: something coming from elsewhere leaves its impression, and what is subsequently expressed is already no longer exactly what was received. Between the two, however slight, a transformation takes place. The quotation might therefore be regarded not as a key handed to the reader, but as something placed beside the text in order to discover what lock, if any, it might bring into view… and to which the reader might himself be the key.
