Books are forever mine, and I am no one. They are objects that bespeak an immutable presence.
They float above their form. Above a flame, which, upon burning them retains the outline of their image as ashes simulating the original copy.
They are the most difficult to write about, precisely because their of-or-about-ness relates to the endless possibility of writing, to the metalanguage of interpretation. The text lays in the book. Yet, the book lays not in the text, but in the figureless ways the text emanates from without the contours of its cover. Therefore, the true bibliophile cannot be the one who wholly admires the book for its mode of presentation or production, but for its mode of reoccurring in the heterogeneous domain of a disjointed memory, for its phantasmagoric resonance in the collective manifold of dreams and waking life.
A book is already beyond its objectivity, beyond its bookness, whether written or read. While it is deceptively turned-object-under-one-cover, and its binding works to ensure the organization of ideas in a way similar to the fascist function of the stapler (preserving an ordered aggregate of information with a decisive pounding of the fist), the book’s presentation would coincide more closely with its ontology if there were no binding.
If, unhinged, it lay precariously aligned with the top of a monument along which the wind gracefully blew. So that, in revealing their impossibility as forever numbered, the pages would separately spread over the expanse and fall to the ground like the seeds of a plentiful harvest. Their flight would not follow the horizon, but recede into it, towards the orient, defying, at the same time, the horizontality of the occident. The chronology of thought as linear. The horizontality of the text. This text.
To read a book is never to read across its content. It is to read into its a-historicity, while simultaneously becoming an ever-present-part-of-it.
