I am the Stranger

    We are living in a foreign country.
    -Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions

Image: Edward S. Curtis, Chaiwa, a Tewa Indian girl with a butterfly whorl hairstyle, 1922

Title: quote from Edmond Jabès

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”

Naked and dressed in stars

     I was a great many far cries from myself. 

     -Gary Lutz

     Image: Lisette Model, First Reflection, New York

     Title:  Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I, trans. by Rosmarie Waldrop 

This forest of letters

   You speak, and suddenly you are a thousand words standing up.

-Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Image: Found
Title: Susan Howe, “Personal Narrative” (Souls of the Labadie Tract, 2007)

A swarm of voluptuous moths

    Amazingly,
I am too the memory of a sword
and of a solitary, falling sun,
turning itself to gold, then gray, then nothing.
I am the one who sees the approaching ships
from harbor. And I am the dwindled books,
the rare engravings worn away by time;
the one who envies those already dead.
Stranger to be the woman who interlaces
such words as these, in some room in a house.

-adapted from Jorge Luis Borges, “I” 

Image: Christo and Jeanne Claude, Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park, Riehen, Switzerland, 1997-98
Photo: Wolfgang Volz
Title: Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Furrow and Word

Joseph Conrad, landlocked but reliving the sea, wrote much of his work with a favorite pen.

-Joshua Cohen, “The Font of the Hand”

Image: Bianca Brunner, Split, 2010

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions (Rosmarie Waldrop, translator)

Blue Desert with Dunes of Rain

As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
-Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Image: Gyorgy Kepes, Juliet Kepes with Peacock Feather, 1939 +

Title: Nod to Edmond Jabès, from “After the Deluge” as found in If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabès

The Physicality of Writing

I discovered the tongue and the lips of my heart. Since then I have not had a mouth.

—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions: Volume I [The Book of Yukel, Return to the Book], translated by Rosmarie Waldrop

Photo:  Edward S. Curtis