. . . open but, also, at the same time, to destabilize the ready-made versions of the texts with a view to erase them. You know you have to accept the idea; to read is to erase, to leave lit-erasure come and go between the texts and let it run towards its essence which, you are reminded, may be disappearance. Variation bears in itself an impetus towards oblivion which is progressively revealed as the texts get to be rewritten, reread, rebegun, as the main (absent) theme that gets variation started is incessantly reopened and replayed. The writing is being carried away by its own variational force, far away, further away from where it failed to start, pushed towards the edges, the ends of the novel, where the novel no longer is what you knew it to be, where, suddenly ceasing to be what it used to be, it has the chance, at long last, to get invented once and for the nonce, if only as a text escaped alone from a genre that may owe its existence to not having existed. Each text, as such, in its own singular way, swallows all of literature, expels and explodes it in one book (The Origin of the Brunists), exposing it to the radiations of oblivion . . . Read, write, forget: forget bygone epics (The Public Burning) and antique tragedies (Gerald’s Party); though the writing finds and plunges its roots there, it only makes a spectacle of itself, offers itself to you in its gestural language, turns itself into pure performance on the stage of the novel, exhausted as the latter is, panting and convulsing from its last pangs of agony, finally about to die its long protracted death. Fated, the writing thus joyously runs to its death, exhausts itself some more trying to say it all, to the very last word, so it can at last start again elsewhere, elsewhen, confident of its own opening, widening perspectives; the writing seeks its own death in a programmatic suicide, goes on a quest for its own catastrophe, its own disaster, to let come what may for, yes, anything can happen: so let it come since death must find it alive; let it come, yes, come, come, as death is belittled, blissfully protracted, F again, FF again, until it no longer has any hold on the subject nor on the writing itself, both incessantly dying, and dying again, and again, both, in a book to come: now, right now—a book to be-come as, coming, it disappears, forgets everything including itself, much like most characters, forgetful as they come, yet trying to remember, to salvage some tie or connection with a past they may not have lived, a story they may not have performed in, a story for the most part that remains to be retold from the edges, the ends of the book, where the book no longer is what you knew it to be (The Adventures of Lucky Pierre) but, for that matter, has not ceased yet to lend its generous pages to a pen that caresses them fondly, gently, amorously, violently . . . The holes and gaps into which the writing erotically plunges and forgets itself convey the vertiginous fact of the world’s porosity, the fact that the world is made of absences, of blanks and dark holes. To tip into them is to tip into oblivion, to have a taste of infinity, the infinite variety of an ever-novel language, the language of “fiction.” These textual orifices are as many syntactic nodes that keep unknotting, loosening their grip to point to the possibility of still other nodes towards which the writing converges and diverges, in all directions at once: what you read in those texts are diverse trajectories that you come to embody. The text is but the mapping of your passages into its fluctuating geography—the dead ends it forces you into, the forking paths it puts in your way, the same bridges it lures you into crossing more than twice: have you been here before? yes, or so you seem to remember, before you remember there is nothing to remember, or if there is, or was, well, you seem to have forgotten: the text you keep returning to is always the same, undoubtedly, yet the variational force that works through it has turned it already and is still turning it into something else altogether, something different if not truly “other”: in a way, the text is always its own approximation—lagging behind or in front of itself, a text-lag of sorts, forever out of sync . . . The text you read then unavoidably points to more possibilities beside itself, thus hinting, albeit ironically or parodically, to a residual aura or auratic remnants you, now and here, now-here, no-where, seem to be catching glimpses of. What pornography reveals, though in an ironic mode, may be this: the ephemerality of a real that lets itself be seen intermittently, to the rhythms of desire and pleasure, before disappearing or metamorphosing. What pornography conveys is that the real is sufficient unto itself: the pornographic scene is perpetually reenacted, performed live in a variety of contexts, always right here before your very eyes, always right now, depriving you in its immediacy of ways and means to say anything about it; pornography may be nothing more than the invention of a language in or through which the real appears for what it is, as it is—impenetrable, unfathomable: nothing is hidden, what you see is what you get, what you get is positively nothing and this nothingness cannot be equated with a lack, for, quite the opposite, it possesses a thereness that is not there, a pure excessive, though blinding, presence, some “radiance.” Everything is there for you to see, yet perhaps you cannot see it, not knowing where to look for it, not knowing how to read for it. To read—in order to read you might first have to accept that there is nothing to read in fine; because you know everything has already been told before, everything still has to be retold, untold, rewritten, unwritten, reread, unread. If the focus of variation is on the motion and process within the writing, you still have to acknowledge that the transience of its gesture, the brevity of its performance, destines it to a certain disappearance and constitutes its own raison-de-n’être-pas. The texts, even when inked on printed pages, are ephemeral constructs and, as such, demand an ethical reading capable of “operating” them: in the course of your brief encounters with them, you will have to let them go on their run to oblivion, let them unloose their lines and reconfigure themselves, un-founded, in-finite as they are and have ever been: for where and when does the writing begin; does it ever . . .
