I esteem the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures in Egypt
The thought I was just now thinking has suddenly eluded me. I have lost it. How strange. As I am unable to find it again, I cannot return it to its place and thus forget it. The lost thought cannot be forgotten. I search around for what might have preceded the thought before it was lost, or what was to have come after it but I do not find any clues. I don’t recall any of it. Without it, I may not exit the place where the thought was. I stay there, circling within it, a place where the lost thought isn’t. As a consequence, I have also lost the movement that moves on perpetually from the place where it was. I am left behind at the place from where the thought has departed. I am stuck in the place that is nowhere but the place where I am stuck without my thought. I have lost where the place is in my thinking but I am still there, in it. I cannot recognise them, the lost thought, or the place from where the thought was lost. The flow of which the lost thought was a part is now also swept away, as by a wide sleeve dragged in an imperious gesture across a table set with cups of crystal and plates of silver. I have lost the joint that is built into the thought that, before it was lost, had been just one thinking-joint amongst all the thinking-joints which ordinarily join and think my joined together thoughts and articulate them in a doubled, consuming and forgetting, movement, but which in this one case, because this thought is lost, because this one thought is unjoined, and because it is unarticulated from the rest, separated out, and causing it, this one thought, to become something else in my loss of it, something separated from the sequence it belongs to, so it is that as it continues to evade me that I find myself in this state of loss where I also find everything now unjoined. Everything is now unjoined but everything is also associated, that’s the mystery. The lost thought is not something that is separated in the sense of having a distinct content. It is indistinctly separate. I find I cannot let it go precisely because it has eluded my grasp. I begin to think my thinking of the lost thought is now also actively inhibiting my thinking it. It is because I can’t think the lost thought that I can’t forget it and it is because I can’t think the lost thought that I can’t exit the place where it was. I am still here in the place from where what is lost is missing, a place which was not there before the loss. The place I am in is only a place because of what is missing from it. It is like the sort of unscheduled place where a train might stop but which is not a station, a place the train ordinarily passes through without recognising it - but because this one time, this one train has stopped in this one unscheduled place, it has also somehow failed to recognise this track on which it stands, and now it cannot move forward, and it’s stuck here for no reason. I am like the stuck train in a way, I cannot move forward along the track I no longer recognise, but then you could say, at a certain point, I find I have moved across a category threshold in my thinking of the lost thought, and I am no longer like a train not moving forward but more like the spinning roulette wheel from Seminar XI, and at this certain point my lost thought begins joining up everything that my spinning throws out, it joins all my thoughts together but in relation to the spinning mechanism of loss, and becomes the sole and unifying operational principle of my spin-thinking. I say join but it is no longer joining as on a track but associating as in the anisotropic behaviour of particles within a cloud, or of birds in a flock. Everything is now in the light of, in the time of, what is spun out of loss. Every thought is transformed as if it were redeemed within wyrds of loss. The loss of the lost thought suffuses all other thoughts with loss, causing them to be found anew in relation to loss which somehow is stuck but spinning and throwing out all these thoughts. Some time later, I think, I will replace the words ‘my lost thought’ with the words ‘my lost time’ and in this way ‘my frantic searching’ shall be replaced by ‘my nostalgic regret’. It is something like the dream where I was alone in the cafe. I sat on a chair at a table near the window. On the table was a plate, a cup and a book. I pushed the cup to the side. It held coffee. I pushed the plate away. It held toast. I pulled the book near. It held words. I took a bite into the toast whilst also ‘reading’ as if this what I do, and the crumbs fell on the book. I held the cup in one hand and the toast in the other, the book closed by itself and I lost the page. Should I hold the book away from me, as I lean back in the chair, and stretch my legs back? Should I hunch over the book, my head in my hands, my feet pulled under the chair? I pushed the book away, I pulled the plate and the cup closer. These two now formed a barrier against the book. I might surmount the barrier against the book if I should eat and drink first, and only then read. Or I might make the book a barrier against the cup and the plate by reading decisively, only punctuating it with set breaks for eating and drinking. Both these seem surmountations of barriers set against time. I dreamt I was uncomfortable in the cafe and I was altogether uncertain as to why I should want to combine reading with eating and drinking there. The three objects on the table did not go together, there were only so many combinations in arranging them but still they would not go together, they refused, and yet, there they were, held in the place on the table by my spinning - flingings. Something span out. You were alone in the cafe, like Barthes, who says, ‘there is a scenography of waiting.’ Yes, I wait for news of a stay in the scheduled event. I am tethered to the event that approaches me and from which I seek to escape. I wait for news of an intercession, of another event that cuts across, interrupting the inexorability of the event before me. I wait for news of a stay of execution of the event, then I may go on a little further in the new space that opens before it. The new measured space, measured in units before the postponed event, that already feels so old. The always encroaching event may be delayed at the last minute, for a short while its inevitability is pushed back but it is never cancelled. It recedes but does not disappear. Yes, don’t you live in the dread that constitutes your free time as the space before the execution of the event? For you, it is always the hour before Monday morning, and this event confronting you is always only the smallest of the events also waiting in line, held back, waiting to begin their encroachment upon your free time. Yes, I am always waiting for news of the staying of the event that is lying in wait for me. Yes, modern inadequacy before the approaching event is proof of how we have forgotten the ancients’ conception of commensurability: the statue of god should be neither taller nor shorter than the worshipper. Then, it is something like the predicament of the Ardennes’ baker, about whom the philosophers talk. Yes, he was cursed as they say, but I think he was an alchemist. No, a baker, he perceived differentiation in all cakes at the level of mixture. Yes, at the level of filling. No, but he discovered meaning to be always qualunque. Yes, concrete. No, flour. Yes, ubique. No, how shall we willy nilly formulate it, ‘meaning be flour and substance be variety - happy, happy all the time’? This is something like the imputed antinomian theology of the Free Spirit. How so? I may only tell it in a parable. Yes, that is what you would think. We are interested in the stepping and not the stones - exit and entry, again and again. Then, it is something like Conrad’s Youth, ‘This could have happened anywhere but in England.’ It is something like that. Then, in your telling, I shall play the lesser parts, the director, accountant, lawyer and ‘myself’, whilst you shall be the Marlowe whom myself recalls telling his tale. I am not Marlowe, I am Nurse. And I am Cut, but even so, the fable shall be upon your telling of the path taken by the unwork directed at preserving Judea: all states shall be abolished but Judea, fixed as the made up name of the invented world historical problematic, shall be abolished only at the last - then, we imagine either America or China shall be abolished second from last, for reason of accumulated inertia of their forces of production, but who should we be rid of first, surely not Germany today, that ship has sailed, it would have to be Russia or Iran for sheer malignancy, no? But that is not the story I wish to tell of the Ardennes baker. I see, but I thought the story concerned abolition? Yes, the impossibility of abolition. And yet our good baker was both an indistinctionist and also an annihilationist, how can that be? That is not the parable. Then go on with your telling, and pass the bottle! One morning, the emperor’s favourite daughter wondered at the baker’s keening for the gourd ladles of Musashi which turned upon their hooks in the four winds. The effect of his song so moved her to lofty thoughts that she resolved to rise and go then to Musashi - and she commanded the baker to carry her. Note: Musashi is both a real place and also one of the names for somewhere we have never been but where we are impelled to return. The baker swung a sack of flour on his back, this was ‘the princess’, and he set off on his journey to Musashi. To prevent pursuit by the emperor’s men, he set fire to the Bridge of Seta. It was many months before the imperial search party tracked down the princess in the province of Musashi. By means of legal loophole, the imperial emissaries had no jurisdiction for bringing the princess to her father once she had refused to go with them. Instead, she gave a message for them to carry to the emperor, ‘we may only return to the homeland that lies ahead.’ The emperor mused upon the message and recited, ‘the strawberry desires to grow along the path’, and all at once decreed the province of Musashi should be his daughter’s dominion. He dragged his sleeve across the stone table. He ordered the building of a palace to house her caprice, which upon the princess’s death became a temple called Takeshiba, and when this fell to ruin and the old gods were forgotten, Musashi lapsed into a place of swaying gourd ladles. Cut: it is something like Kafka’s Leopards. Nurse: and in a different way, something like Canute’s bones hurled through the great west window of Winchester Cathedral. Cut: from the parable we learn there is no force in agency, but agency may find its place in force. Nurse: or, the velvet claw in the iron mitten. Cut: or the velvet foot in the iron sock. Nurse: or the iron head in the velvet hat. Cut: or the velvet coq in the iron van. Nurse: please not with the mock joyceanisms. Cut: then, or the velvet necessity in the iron chance. Nurse: or the iron flingings across the velvet magnet. Cut: or the iron curtain drawn by the velvet rope. Nurse: or, he who has not brought his lady may not contest for the kestrel. Cut: or, silver bowls of water, and towels, some of white linen, and some of green. Nurse: or, for as long as you conceal it, it shall conceal you. Cut: they rode the green path until they came to the forked tree, and the fountain and the bowl. Nurse: or, for she was the woman of the Pride of the Clearing. Cut: or, he found a towerless fortress, and asked the priest at the gate for a blessing. Nurse: or, her fingers were whiter than shoots of marsh trefoil. Cut: or, the seven shards of the flying mirror carried through the clouds on a breeze ninety nine miles long; Nurse: or, a lad dressed in a scarlet under-robe and a hunting cloak of light purple; Cut: or, a lady in waiting standing beside the door of the chapel; Nurse: or, he wore blue grey trousers, a cherry-blossom cloak over three scarlet robes; Cut: or, he entered through a gap in the fence and delivered a knotted letter of pure white paper, the red seal was frozen, the inked characters darkened then lightened; Nurse: or, she was lighted by a distant fire, her sleeves were long, she shaded her face with a fan and sung; Cut: or, a haunting moon reflected in my dull-red sleeves of glossy silk; Nurse: or, the distant sound of flutes as players not nightingales pass outside the women’s barred apartments; Cut: he carried on his shoulder a gold-chased shield with a bar of azure enamel; Nurse: at the court of the lame king, blood issued like a fountain from the tip of the sharpened spear; Cut: the ship of the golden shoe makers when everything turned to kelp; Nurse: the boy called Skilled Hand who hit the wren between sinew and leg bone; Cut: an oak grows between two lakes and an oak grows on the high plains; Nurse: a sow eats the worms that fall from the red kite; Cut: I dismounted at the peasant’s house and there passed the night; Nurse: three shields, three spears, three blows, how many wounds? Yes, the lost thought is sewn into your dull red sleeve as you sweep it across the polished stone table. No, it is not the lost thought but only its remains. Yes, it is the thought cut from the world we do not know. No, everything emerges from the cut but without blocking the place. Yes, a roulette wheel of characters flung out as from a first wound; No, the lost thought remains unknowingly immersed in its place which it cannot know. No, the lost thought as beast in its place sewn into its fundamental fantasy. Yes, by the waters. No, the waters. Yes, of Babylon. No, we lay down. Yes, and swept. No, and swept. Yes, with our dull red sleeves. No, for thee Zion
