En Face De

Prologue :

" Mystics are not themselves
They do not exist in selves.
They move as they are moved,
talk as words come,
see with sight that enters their eyes.
I met a woman once and asked her where love had led her..."

-- Farid ud-Din Attar
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Nine months.
The doctors gave me nine months, you say. You look at me. Almost accusingly.
What am I to do in the face of your despair?

9
In face of—to oppose, to set against, to stand before, to face. A face with openings for air, light and sound. A face with senses, which senses. A face that connotes seeing, a face which always has eyes. Life pours from the eyes—an outpouring—love sees through the eyes. Eye: opening to, opened by, light. Eyes are first an opening to. A newborn is (an) opening.


Image © Gilad Benari. All Rights Reserved.

18
Nine months. The un-bear-able passage of time will kill you before these traitorous cells which have turned against you, the ones that will deliver you. I put my hands up to your face; your cheeks—like your eyes—are burning, but I offer no sympathy. Every day we die a little death, I say. You fling my hands away. Your eyes are wet, filled with tears which never fall. I don’t want this pain, you say, I am suffering. Yes you are, I think, you are what it is: suffering becomes you. No, you say, I am suffer-ing …it is a verb.

You put your head in my lap: save me from this godawful night. In Sanskrit, I say, night is ratri: that which gives rest, which takes you into its lap and comforts. Night is always comforting. No, you say, “night is the opening onto what disturbs”. I watch the violence and disorder that ravages your world seep into the words you choose to use. I think of what you just said. Night is (an) opening.

27
At night you come, you sit near me. You have in your hands this book, you open it; you say: teach me how to read. What, I ask. Eyes, hands, bodies, you say. Do you remember the time I sent you my first manuscript but without my knowing, you had read some of the shorter articles I had published in the newspaper and you wrote back—I still have that note—you wrote back, “I have already read you,” do you remember? Yes. I remember.

You read (to) me. (And in the instant, I know you are not my father because my father would always read with me):

36
‘I recalled a young Russian worker from the country who still held the belief, when he came to Moscow, that the stars were the eyes of God and the eyes of the angels. They talked him out of it. They could not contradict it at all, but they could talk him out of it. And rightly so. For the stars are the eyes of human beings, which rise out of their closed lids and become bright and regain their strength. And that is why all the stars are above the countryside, where everyone is sleeping, and over the town, there are only a few, because there are so many restless people there, weeping and reading, laughing and watching, who keep their eyes.’

45
Keep my eyes, you say, they are ever-turned to you. I tire of this responsibility; I sigh because of your sigh(t). I am always under siege, you say, your mourning is dying me. But I never mourn for you, I know, for you I only weep. We do not weep with tears, we weep with words because mourning is selfish and never for others, always and only for our selves. Tears are a cry of the heart and need no language, no voice. I say, “It is not only the voice of blood that needs no eyes, love, which people say is blind, also has a voice of its own”. I speak to your eyes, because eyes are also ears. I speak with my eyes, because eyes are also mouths. What interests me about the eyes, I think, is that they can both give and receive. Like hands. I think: “Eyes are the most delicate, most powerful hands”.

Image © Gilad Benari. All Rights Reserved.

54
I reach my hand outtoward you, outstretched, an act of birth. An opening of the fist. (Hands can only receive when they open—when touch becomes an opening). You bring my other hand alongside it, and hold them both, cupped together: like a womb. A heart the size of my fist. A womb the size of my heart-hands. A womb which waits. A womb of darkness. In the ninth hour of this ninth night that you have spent here in the skin of our love, wrapped in the skein of your tears; watching, waiting, desiring.

63
I love you, you say.
I smile.
Do you love me, you ask?
Why do you always ask me when you know the answer?
Because I want to hear you say it; because you don’t say it enough.
I look at you in exasperation, you look back at me in desperation. Your eyes search my face with the urgency of one who can no longer see. I search for the words that will speak in their own absence, in the pre-face to healing your unseeing with this originary Braille, this nightwriting, where we see through our hands.

72
I write at night. I write on a luminous screen which lights my face with its light. I write on this opaque veil of light, a technological star, with pre-existing letters. I do not form the letters, I merely choose them, arrange them. I am privileged, but also prisoner; for in this choice, I am not free. You send me letters which become visible on this screen, letters outside of time, letters of love. They are an appearing, an apparition, an aperture. A dark opening. A black hole, I announce. The power of your words draw me in, and I am lost. You are a singularity. I cannot escape you. You consume me. You are an inf(l)ection. I hold your head in my hands, absently feeling for the hair that you have long since lost to your dis-ease. “Black holes have no hair”, you muse.

81
You open the book that has been read to me since I was a child, the one where Silver rescues Gabriel from a black hole. You are reading the part: “Even light cannot escape a black hole, though light travels at 300,000 kilometres a second. Travelling at the speed of light is not fast enough to make escape possible, but through Silver, Gabriel travels at the speed of love”. What is the speed of love, I ask? “I suspect that love has a number of different speeds,” you say, “Sometimes it will belt the universe as fast as light or faster. Sometimes it will take a slow train through France”. I know the speed of love, because last October, I took that slow train through France.

 
Image © Gilad Benari. All Rights Reserved.

90
You read to me—at night—fingers gliding beneath each word, as if I were yet a child. But in this relationship, I am neither mute nor blind; I am not unable to speak this language that you know. And so I re-call (call forth) from memory, this poem (on a poem):

99    The problem
        with this poem
        is that
        it needs
        light
        to be read.

108  light:
        daylight
        candle-light
        electric light.
        sun light.

       One can dance
       in the dark
       one can sing
       in the dark
       one makes
       love
       in the dark

117 but this poem
       cannot be read
       in darkness
       that is perhaps
       its greatest
       weakness.

We speak in rhyme. We speak in time. The language of the heart.

126
What is it about eyes that fascinate? “That they are the part of the body that doesn’t age,” you say. Death has become an obsession for you, death has caught (hold of) you (by surprise).The thinning of skin reveals the ghastly white of your bones. You haunt death, in the shell of this eternal mo(u)rning. In death you are pure: in your magnificent ruin, in your graceful collapse. You look at me ruefully, you ask: “How to love anything other than the possibility of ruin? Than an impossible totality? Love is as old as this ageless ruin—at once originary, an infant even, and already old”.

135
Always already. Death in your eyes that can no longer see (me). Seeming to see. You are right, I think: eyes do not age. They simply divide, divert, deflect light. The extent to which your sight falters externally is the extent to which your eyes start to focus inward. The eyes journey from outside to inside in the span of a life. “The eye is a lamp,” I think, “it doesn’t receive light, it gives it”. Of course, I will not tell you this, because you will burn yourself. You are too close to me, too far from you. Your inner effulgence so terrorizes you that you hunger for the outside, like a child. “A child is just a mouth:” I say “a hunger”. You look at me, to me, like that, like hunger—urgent, imminent hunger—and I am broken. Because you come from a world in a hurry, because hunger cannot wait. Wait. A word which is always already in the future. I cannot wait now. I can never wait now.

144

Image © Gilad Benari. All Rights Reserved.

153
This is how we began:
Will you tell me a story?
Now, you ask, hand still on the open door.
Yes now, I think, where else is there?
Elsewhere is there, you say.
“Within yourself you have elsewhere. In the heart. In the body. And that’s what elsewhere means,” I say. 
You remain in the doorway. “And so it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spake unto the children of Israel...” You break off. Forty years, you say, I have lived for forty years, abandoned to wander in this desert. 
-God does not desert us-, I say
Your God hid his face, you hiss. For shame. There is venom in your throat.

162
I look straight at you. My irises are aflame. We are the ones who turn away, who turn on God, I say. “God is always already di-eu, di/vided, aimed at by us, hit, split. Lips open in his absence of face. And he smiles on us. The smile of God speaks of the wound we are to him”.
What of my wounds that will never heal? you say, embittered; Do not speak to me of faith: I lost mine long ago.
Your lips are a line. I say nothing.
Don’t look at me: anger scalds your words: I am nothing to look at.

171
Your face is a bruise. I touch my fingers to the scars on your lips, cheeks, eyelids. What I love about eyes is that though they are an opening, they are also a closing. Both guardian and guarded, protector and protected. Eyes are others, you say, because they can never apprehend themselves. I think of Rimbaud: ‘I am an other’. Eye am an other. Eyes are mirrors for others, I say, others who are always inverted, reflected, hidden, veiled, secret, lit.

“Others are secret because they are other,” you say.  What is your secret? I ask, What are you not telling me? There is nothing I can think of that I am keeping, you say. You are keeping me (out), I say. There is a wall that comes up behind your eyes. A defense. A separation. It is fear, you tell me. Fear belongs to the day, I say: rest now, the light is fading.
I am scared of death, you say.

180
You are scared to death, I say.
You close your eyes and weep. All these lives, all these years and I have not learned how to Love.
Love is death, I think. If you are so afraid to die, you will be terrified to love.
How could I have been so blind, you cry.
Maybe we are, all of us, blind to each other, I offer.
“How do two blind people love each other?” you ask.
In the dark.

Citations:

En face de: In French, en face de corresponds to the preposition ‘opposite’ in English. Literally, it translates to: in face of.  
 
13-14 Traitorous:  Traitor is derived from tradere, literally: one who delivers.

22 Night is the opening…: Patočka, Jan. Platon et L’Europe. Trans. E. Abrams. Paris: Lagrasse, Verdier, 1983, p. 59.

30 I have already read you:  Nancy, Jean-Luc in Derrida’s Elsewhere. Dir. Safaa Fathy. Perf. Jacques Derrida. VHS. First Run/Icarus, 1999.

34-41 I recalled a young Russian worker…: Rilke, Rainer Maria. “The Seventh Dream”. Selected Works. Trans. G. Craig Houston. New York: New Directions, 1967, p. 23-24.

47-48 It is not only the voice of blood…: Saramago, José. Blindness. Trans. Giovanni Pontiero. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997.

51 Eyes are the most delicate most powerful hands: Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 141.

68 Nightwriting: Night writing was a type of code invented by a soldier Charles Barbier, in order to facilitate communication without sound or light. It was designed to aid soldiers in sending messages between trenches at night without giving away their locations. However, the system proved too complex to be of use. In 1821, Barbier met Louis Braille, who subsequently modified night writing to the system of Braille in use today. 

75-76 You are a singularity: The center of a black hole is called a singularity. It is thought to be a point of infinite density.

78 Black holes have no hair: John Archibald Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term black hole, stated “Black holes have no hair”.  The no-hair theorem of astrophysics gets its name from this statement.
 
81-86 Even light cannot escape…: Winterson, Jeanette. Tanglewreck. London: Bloomsbury, 2006.

93-118 The problem with this poem…: Federman, Raymond. “Dancing in the Dark”. Six More Serious Poems. 1996. <http://www.federman.com/rfpoem7.htm>

123 They are the part of the body…: Derrida, Jacques. Derrida. The Movie. Dir. Kirby Dick, Amy Kofman. Perf. Jacques Derrida. DVD. Zeitgeist, 2004. 

127-129 How to love anything other than…: Derrida, Jacques. Memoirs of the Blind. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993, p. 69.

134-135 The eye is a lamp…: Derrida, Jacques. The Gift of Death. Trans. David Wills. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1995, p. 99.

137 A child is a hunger…: Osho. The Revolution. Mumbai: Jaico, 2003, p. 244.

138-139 You come from a world in a hurry…: Sánchez, Oscar Arias. Nobel Lectures, Peace 1981-1990. Ed. Irwin Abrams. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 1997. 

147-148 Within yourself, you have elsewhere…: Derrida’s Elsewhere. Dir. Safaa Fathy. Perf. Jacques Derrida. VHS. First Run/Icarus, 1999.

149-150 And so it came to pass…: Deuteronomy 1:3. King James Version.  <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%201;&version=9;>

151 Forty years: The Book of Numbers. 32:13.
<http://www.mechon-mamre.org/e/et/et0401.htm>

154 Your God hid his face: Deuteronomy 31:16-18. King James Version.  <http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%201;&version=9;>

156-157 God is always already…: Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 150.

168 Others are secret because they are other: Derrida, Jacques. “Others are Secret because they are Other”. Paper Machine. Trans. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005, p. 136.

179 How do two blind people love each other?: Derrida, Jacques. Derrida. The Movie. Dir. Kirby Dick, Amy Kofman. Perf. Jacques Derrida. DVD. Zeitgeist, 2004.

In war the dark is on…: Berger, John. “Written in the night: The pain of living in the present world”. Le Monde Diplomatique. 18 February 2003.

I write without seeing that I write…: Cixous, Hélène. Stigmata: Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge, 1998, p. 149.

I write without seeing. I came…: Diderot, Denis. “Letter to Sophie Volland, June 10, 1759”. Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works. Ed. Trans. Margaret Jourdain. Chicago: Open Court, 1916, p.107.

Comments

I used to look for your writings when i looked for smiles, beauty and colours. Now i feel like reading with you.

i never thought of it but it is so true...."they are the part of the body that doesn’t age....."
deep intense writing Nidhi

I love your writing and your thoughts and si claro, you. When are you coming home?