My Own Desert Places

     "For the desert is simply that:… an ecstatic form of disappearance."

  -Jean Baudrillard

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   "You don’t need me. What you really need is a mirror. Because any stranger is for you simply a mirror in which to reflect yourself. I don’t ever again want to return to such a desert of mirrors."

-Kōbō Abe

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You are there
for an instant Blue desert
with dunes of rain Thirst is granted
Space is a breach You burn in the night
whose walls are down I see by your oil
by the wick in the middle where a flame blossoms

-Edmond Jabès, excerpt from “After the Deluge,” If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

Image: Max Scheler, Art Class for Retired Ctizens, Sun Valley, Arizona, 1962
Title: Robert Frost, “Desert Places”

That Very Elsewhere

The mad state is, as he emphasizes over and over again, empty.
Teeming with emptiness. Knotted on emptiness. Immodest in its
emptiness. You can pull emptiness out of it by the handful.
“I am not here. I am not here and never will be.”
You can pull it out endlessly.

Anne Carson, from Semaine d’Artaud 

Image: James Kao, Tablescape, 2004
Title: Judith Butler on “the poetics of non-arrival,” excerpt from Who Owns Kafka?

The rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall

   I have rarely lost sight of myself; I have detested and adored myself — and so, we have grown old together.

-Paul Valéry, Selected Writings of Paul Valéry
Image: via
Title: Franz Kafka, The Blue Octavo Notebooks

On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there."
-J.A. Baker, The Peregrine 


Image: Cheryle St. Onge 
Title: St. John Perse

I studied the little girl and at last rediscovered my mother

“A novel is not a place one passes through; it is a place one inhabits.”

-Paulin Limayrac, “Du Roman acuel et de nos romanciers,” Revue des deux mondes from The Arcades Project. 

Image: Sergio Larrain, Passage Bavestrello, Valparaiso, Chili, 1952
Title: Selina Mayer