1   This morning of 11 June 1985

This morning of 11 June 1985 (it’s five o’clock), while writing this on the scant space left free by the papers on my desktop, I hear passing, in the Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, two floors below on my left, a delivery van which has no doubt pulled up in front of the former Nicolas store beside the Arnoult butcher shop.

The motor keeps running; and while I listened to the sound of voices and crates, the previous moment has invisibly ebbed, intense with anguish and hesitation over starting to write this piece in lines that will be black and cramped, in miniscule letters, without deletions, regrets, reflection, imagination, or impatience, promising nothing, but their own existence line after line on the page of the notebook in which I write them.

And I am writing only in order to keep on going, to elude the anguish awaiting me once I end, once I suspend their uncertain and awkward progression, in order that this new beginning, in the wake of so much anxiety and paralysis, won’t turn out to be just another false start of the prose enterprise, object of my vain endeavors for so many years.

I am writing that summer has abruptly come upon us, or perhaps that there has been a brief break in the clouds, although the sky is out of view; whatever the reason, the night seems less dark behind the shutters of my window.

This makes me anxious; I need my night to be fading yet still dark in order to find the courage to go on, even pointlessly, with my work at hand.

But it’s true, and how could it be otherwise, that from this point on everything is dispiriting, discouraging, to avoid using more violent words.

For this morning of my new beginning, I readied myself for the waning darkness (3:00 A.M.): I forced myself, for several similar mornings, to grow accustomed to the idea of filling these pages with black lines slowly and steadily, under the cone of the black lamp which would be, as it is going to be, as it is at present, slowly attacked, weakened, blurred, invaded by the

            insidious brightness gradually streaming in from the invisible
I § 100 ←
            sky above the street.

And so, by accumulating such interchangeable mornings, with my notebook and lamp always in the same spot, the approaching daylight always and in similar fashion, diluting, clouding, muddling, flooding the circle of seclusion where I expend my effort, just a bit earlier each day as summer nears, afterward a bit later moving into autumn and winter, and so on, I’ll thus preserve as intact and unaltered as possible the impetus of the initial moment that I report here as it passes.

In this interval, between that instant before dawn when I’ll begin stirring from the darkness under the lamp, and the other moment when, despite the drawn shutters, the light of day filling the intersection outside will finally dissolve the electric yellow glow on my paper—in this daily interval of my now empty life, I will write.

2   I would like, in short

I would like, in short, to preserve almost unchanged the conditions for a prose experience that will, as much as it is possible, be a daily one: the place will be nearly invariable, the time fixed; and from my pen the signs accruing, crowding against each other in my notebook, will freeze on this image of quasi-permanence, as if recorded within it, enclosed within its borders.

And I’ll try to make this apparent, along the way, through description.

I find quite obviously a slim yet real consolation in telling how my story gets underway in this circumstance which is the ever-renewed beginning of daytime arriving and nullifying (with increasing noise, with light) the peaceful, desolate yellow glow silently surrounding me on this table: one, two, three mute hours during which everything, in this house, the square, the streets, everything, or almost everything is asleep—this is the self-imposed condition enabling me to relate what, even though doing my best to wander as little as possible from the time of composition, will be above all a work of memory.

And each day, if I succeed in seizing some glint, if I manage, as the old Irish hermit says, to lead the darkness to the light, my basic purpose will be to entangle it with the banality of these lines, wobbly, black, relatively crooked upon the paper, in the yellow oval slicing the table, and where soon, once daylight filters in, and I lay down my pen, it will vanish.

Thus, the conditions in which I place myself, this self-imposed constraint, will express, despite the very elementary nature of the analogy, something of my projected attempt.

Each paragraph, each link of the story of memory, “the great fire of London,” should therefore be a new beginning, soon enough decomposed by the light of day, and as oblique as the daylight itself.

In the segment of waning night, which overlaps on one side the mud of my sleep, on the other the course of my daily activities, each fragment of memory that I’ll extirpate
from time, once set down in black here,
                                                                                                                    → I § 101
Will evaporate, like the light set down in yellow by the lamp
Before the more decisive light of the morning sun.

What will remain will be this narration; interlaced with night, its awful silence; where I hope, by means of accumulation and perseverance, to achieve, if only unintentionally, my end.

3   Last night, before going to bed

Last night, before going to bed, I placed on the desk the sketch pad with the red hardback cover bought on Rue Delambre, which served as our photographic journal, and this morning I open it to this picture from April 1980, in Fez, taken in our room in the Hotel Zalagh.

The photograph (it’s a photograph) consists of a rectangle outlined against the back wall of the room, opposite the bed, from where the viewing eye is positioned, but which is out of sight. The window, also invisible, is to the left. The wall is a completely dull, empty bumpy surface, smudged with dust and minute streaks created by the unevenly reflected light.

And, within the picture of the wall, of the rectangle sectioned from the wall by the mechanical acolytes of the eyes, there are two rectangles whose proportions don’t match and whose angles are somewhat at odds, the first figure located toward the top left, the second toward the bottom center, a little to the right.

The first rectangle inside the rectangle cut in the wall by the arbitrary geometry of the negative (it casts a perceptible shadow) inscribes the second rectangle of a picture (here, then, the picture of a picture) showing Fez, the very city where this hotel room isolated where this rectangular slice of wall has been captured. Fez is presumably visible through the window, to the left in the space of the photograph, the model for the picture I am describing, and whose features appear in it such as a person might see them from this very window, but only as depicted inside the darker rectangle, inscribed with a few houses, an inhabited hillside in the background, the stalk of a palm tree up front on the left, some sort of Moroccan tree standing on the right, at the top of a slope; finally, a view of the sky, which, on the paper’s gray and black surface, seems to be made of the same substance as the wall, to exist in the same expanse as that of the largest rectangle, the photograph itself. And likewise, this view is approximately what could be seen of Fez if one stepped out onto the room’s balcony.

The second rectangle inside the photograph is almost square. Horizontally it’s only a little larger than its height; it represents a mirror hanging on the wall. Like the picture containing the picture of Fez, it too casts a shadow, and this shadow appears on the right side of the rectangle, more marked along the vertical line, barely a blur under the lower horizontal rim; a shadow volume, a piece of solid angle to be latched onto by vision. And inside the mirror shown in the picture, you can also see the surface of the opposite wall against which the bed is placed; it’s from there that this picture was taken and, in short, is seen, necessarily, by the person looking at it (whether he knows this or not).

The person looking at the picture is stretched out on the bed, though he doesn’t know it, since the bed is not pictured. In the mirror a further rectangle of this other wall is captured, a little darker on the photograph than the one whose surface is shown as a large rectangle, elongated by the picture’s composition; and, in the rectangle of wall, almost square-shaped, glimpsed in the mirror, there appears, lower left, a sliver of the cone of a light from a lamp pulled in, tamed, and weakened by the picture. A single emanation of the cone leaves its trace, a visible curve, standing out like a darker gray hill in the picture, beginning at the lower half of the almost square mirror, rather near its left corner, and rising along an approximately thirty-degree slope. The mirror-imprisoned portion of the cone of light is white. Such is the picture that I have before me at this moment.

But in reality I have two rather different versions of this photograph before me, facing opposite in the notebook: one is dark, the other bright, or, more precisely, pale.

Thus, lingering with one’s gaze upon the two panels of the double picture may create a sense of seeing a photographed span of time, stretching from night to dawn, in this room in Fez, and filling it with silent, peaceful, passing hours.

The pale picture is my favorite, and not only, it seems to me, because it’s the “better” photograph, being better assembled, with the appearance of a more felicitous arrangement of rectangles (their respective proportions, their dimensions), but above all, I believe, because of the peaceful agitation, the emotion of this imaginary, implied dawn invading the lamp above the bed: implied by the whole implicit night.