We came too late, I say. Our first word was too late. What did we do? Something bad happened, something was destroyed so we could come and say our first word, which was already too late.
*
Late for what? We don’t know. Our first word delayed us, plunged us into lateness, that’s all we know. Are we responsible? Something disappeared when we began to find the words for it, that’s all we know.
*
We were born into the world by violence and by a stranger violence we reclaimed it. Then the words themselves began to disappear and the real farce began. Aren’t our lives synonymous with this triple fall?
*
What should we have done? We shouldn’t be here, says X. But what’s to be done now? How do we use the power that was given to us, that we claimed so greedily? Can we even use it? It seems to fall apart in these very words. We shouldn’t even be here, says X, we shouldn’t have come.
*
How do we restore what dies for us? We endure by an ancient violence, we know no other way. If we can’t go back we must die too, X says, die even more strangely than we began, together with what our words destroy.
*
But how to give up words when words are all we have? The answer is in the question, one of us says. Let the trail of ink have its way, let the words dispense with us. Let what was killed in our names, which we can no longer even name, resurrect itself in these words: our words without us.
Notes for Nothing 