QED

For Mana Hojda

The internet is down. The TV is down. The telephone is down. Am I dead? But I can’t see myself in the ground. Not while I’m blasted by V. Lübbeck’s organ works, after a round of three sets of listening sessions to Die Zauberflöte in a row. The umlaut over the letter “u” means that the door is open. I blow a whisper through the flute. “O” that goes through “ö” marks a traversing movement from wonder to doubt. O, to learn more, or ö, is it worth it? What can a master in ambivalence teach? To go with it, say a silent yes to everything and nothing, but also simultaneously leave it at that, say a silent no to nothing and everything? “It” and “that” are unknowns. I call on Jabès who is the key master of cryptic texts. He can even open non-knowledge. Non-knowledge is, of course, not ignorance. It is silence. How Jabès makes sense of silence is mind boggling. 20 years I've been thinking about it - and him. And I’m not even dead yet. Jabès says: “Knowledge is extreme poverty of power.” And then, “They turned their spotlights on the eroticism of the word, but it was the eroticism of silence that dazzled.” “They” refers to the lovers in The Book of Questions, an earlier text by Jabès, which he brings in sight. I cite this text while peeping through its hole, the parenthesis that Jabès uses to sOrround it, so that I don’t get enlightened all at Once. O, staying at the margins! Non-knowledge is here present and it guides my reading: (“The most erotic minute is the chalky minute of silence,” Yukel had noted.“But lust is waves of sweat foaming with sperm,” said Yaël once. “Unforgetable nights. You write with sperm on the beautiful moist pages of my glistening body.” And right after, as if in a dream: “Lust is a mortar binding the stone.”) I’m reading from The Book of Margins. How do I answer its charges? I know. I embody the missing visual technology, so I can mirror what I’m doing. I cut a hole in my bra and let the silence in my bosom burst through it. Men take a plunge and pay tribute to silence by sucking what “it” gives off itself through the hole. I analyze the situation. There is a trema over the letter “e” in Yaël. I transliterate the Romanian “I”, eu, into ëü. Something has just opened. My mouth. It articulates: “It” is ëü-phoric. “That” you can bet on.