Aller d’une présence subtile à une autre présence subtile pour en extraire une nourriture solaire est un travail d’abeille et de poète. Ce monde détruit les deux.

∆ Christian Bobin

To think about you is blue, like wandering
through a golden forest in the middle of the day:
gardens are born from my words
and with my clouds, I walk through your dreams.

∆ Eduardo Carranza (1913-1985), from Azul De Ti

Language makes a smooth surface for me to roll around lost on.

There’s a level at which words are spirit and paper is skin. That’s the fascination of archives. There’s still a bodily trace.

| Susan Howe, from “The Art of Poetry, No. 97,” the Paris Review

Concepts are centers of vibrations, each in itself and every one in relation to all the others. This is why they all resonate rather than cohere or correspond with each other. There is no reason why concepts should cohere. As fragmentary totalities, concepts are not even the pieces of a puzzle, for their irregular contours do not correspond to each other. They do form a wall, but it is a dry-stone wall, and everything holds together only along diverging lines. (Deleuze & Guattari)

Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.

| Mary Oliver

Language itself is a revenant—that is, a ghost that walks again by repeating and being repeatable. It is older than the speaker, and it will live long after the speaker has died, thus indicating a future to come that is a repetition of the past and the present but still different. Language speaks the speaker, as if ghosts of past generations possesses them in order for them to express themselves to ghosts of the present as well as those of the future.