The texture of words — worlds.

Do we prefer them thick or thin? Should speaking, writing, reading, be fluid — are we annoyed when there are too many stops? Must it flow, keep moving, have momentum, have its own unstoppable élan?

But if too runny, does that also ruin everything?

Must there be some viscosity, allowing it to stick, to remain with us? How else can it hold. And how can we hold onto it, have anything to cling on to: and we would be left adrift.

For there to be rhythm, there have also to be some stops.

Pauses …

La doute,
c’est écrire …

~ Marguerite Duras

… moments where we are not just unsure of what we have written, read, spoken, but if any speaking, reading, writing, has ever occurred, actually taken place, or if something had just taken its place, if you can even call it a thing.

*

Doesn’t the writer begin writing at the moment words escape him, when familiar words become once again  unknown? Doesn’t he write in order to translate silence — without breaking it — into writing, in order to bring back to ordinary language the dignity of a translated language (that language we lack which always appears more melodious, more sonorous, more concrete, richer in its images than our own, and therefore sacred, so to speak)? Whoever reinvents the tongue (la langue), the maternal tongue, doesn’t he break with both the materialism of language and the paternal law that kept him at a distance from it?

~ Claude Lévesque

*

I don’t know what I’m writing about: I am obscure to myself. I only had initially a lunar and lucid vision, and so I plucked for myself the instant before it died and perpetually dies. This is not a message of ideas that I am transmitting to you but an instinctive ecstasy of whatever is hidden in nature and that I foretell. And this is a feast of words. I write in signs that are more a gesture than voice. All this is what I got used to painting, delving into the intimate nature of things. But now the time to stop painting has come in order to remake myself, I remake myself in these lines. I have a voice. As I throw myself into the line of my drawing, this is an exercise in life without planning. The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.

~ Clarice Lispector

One wonders sometimes: is it the my who writes?

Not that I even know who that is, nor if (s)he is any different from the me purportedly within.

red red wine

*

At night, the streets speak.

Especially when I’m lying in bed, my window open, wide. 

They send you sounds — others may attribute them to cars passing, the sanitary workers who roam the lanes collecting refuse announcing the advent of the witching hours, people chatting laughing whispering shouting, but really it is the echo of the streets that find their way to you to me.

And when I am walking. Particularly when it is quiet and there nary is another around. Then the cobblestones send their voices up to me through my feet with my feet alongside the tippy tappy rhythm of my toes.

Street feet.

Feats of streets.

The long winding sloping rising streets shaping the way you walk, almost determining how you walk the speed at which you can do so, do so, try to do so, so also the rhythm they want you to take to beat out on with them so also what you hear.

To walk perchance to dream.

Waltz.

La parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles.

~ Gustave Flaubert

***

Jeremy Fernando reads, writes, and makes things. 

Jeremy Fernando, cobalt | white tin oxide | green: fragmentary wanderings. Tachikawa: Bunker Press, 2024 

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