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Writing life and love
Santiago Cols
a
a
Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures, 4108 Modern Languages Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275,
USA
Online Publication Date: 01 April 2006
To cite this Article Cols, Santiago(2006)'Writing life and love',Angelaki,11:1,199 207
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ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 11 number 1 april 2006
Whats the hurry, in the end? You cant walk
first and later enjoy the landscapes, or the
versere . . . I seek things, I remember others, I
return to the poems, and in addition I go and
I come, I love, I play, I work, I wait, I hope,
I despair, I consider. And it all forms part of
Keats, because I am not going to write about
him, but rather walk by his side and make of
this, in the end, a diary [. . .] I simply enjoy
walking through my memory, arm in arm with
John Keats, favoring every type of encounter,
presentation, and citation.
Julio Cortazar, Imagen de John Keats 19
T
he late Argentine expatriate author Julio
Cortazar was still a young man when he
wrote this, around my age and not yet a famous
writer. Hed only publish his first collection of
short stories later that year, 1951. And hed move
to Paris to begin the second half, the famous half,
of his life. No Hopscotch yet, no Blow Up, no
Cronopios y Famas, none of these have yet been
written, maybe not even conceived. The manu-
script from which this comes would run to
some six hundred pages and would sit in a desk
drawer, unseen, until after his death.
Methodology (metodologa) is the chapter
heading under which the words appear in his
book on Keats.
In the pages that follow I want to show you
what I found as I followed Cortazar on this walk
that he began as a young reader of a young John
Keats. I want to share the perspective this
methodology, this walk, offers on how
Julio and so you and I might think about
being, knowing, making, living, and loving.
I know its customary for me to tell you in
advance what I found, and part of me would
really like to. I know in a way wed both feel
better if I did. But on the other hand Im afraid
that might spoil the walk for you. I think it might
be more enjoyable and more in the spirit of things
to have you just join along and find what you
find.
1
Petrone is a Buenos Aires businessman who
comes to spend a week in Montevideo closing a
deal. On a tip from a friend he takes a room in the
peaceful, almost deserted Hotel Cervantes.
Everything about his stay is routine: the room
is clean and ordinary, his business progresses
smoothly, and he even has leisure time for the
newspaper and a cabaret, though neither is
remarkable enough to arouse his interest.
Everything is normal and satisfactory, except
that he cant sleep because of the soft cry of a
santiago cola s
WRITING LIFE
AND LOVE
julio corta zar and
gilles deleuze
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010199^9 2006 Taylor & Francis Group
DOI: 10.1080/09697250600798110
199
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baby in the room next to his. Something has
disturbed his sleep. Something has awakened
him. This happens four times in the story. The
first time occurs in those first minutes in which
persist the remains of night and of dream and
he thinks that at some moment hed been
disturbed by the cry of some creature (Cortazar
1994b, 311). Petrones sleep is disturbed by the
cry of a baby who (he is told later) doesnt exist.
But the cry exists because it keeps him up at
night. So it is real, even if theres no baby there
because it produces undeniably real effects.
Petrones responses to being awakened to
dismiss the cry as a dream; to dismiss as a
deception the managers assurance that there is
no baby; to dismiss the baby as a hallucination of
the hysterical solitary woman who occupies the
adjacent room all involve rationally explaining
away the phenomenon in order to get back to
sleep. Finally, when each of these explanations
melts away before the heat of the persisting
phenomenon, he flees in terror. Petrone hears the
baby crying from the other side of the door, but
he never tries to open it, to pass through it. The
condemned door behind the wardrobe in his
room, the ghostly door that carries the memory of
the building that the hotel now occupies, the
door: at one time people had entered and exited
through it, banging it shut, leaving it ajar, giving
it a life that was still present in its wood that was
so different from the walls (Cortazar 1994b,
312). Even though, or maybe because,
he glimpses the presence of that past life
embedded in the grain of the wood; even
though, or because, that door demands he
assume some kind of responsibility, Petrone
still treats it like an ordinary non-functioning
condemned door. This door isnt so much
a symbol of or a metaphor for something as it is
a metonym, a piece, a tip of the iceberg of an
entire way of perceiving and experiencing being
in the world that Petrone an ordinary business-
man who just wants to sleep does not want to
accept.
In reflections also first inspired by his reading
of Keats, Julio offers Petrone some advice, in the
form of his description of something he calls
participation. Participation for Julio
refers to a way of relating and relating with the
things of the world. To know, Julio quotes
Levy-Bruhl,
in general, is to objectify, to objectify is to
project outside of oneself, as if the thing were
strange, what one would know. [. . .] The
essence of the participation lies, precisely, in
erasing all duality; in spite of the principle
of contradiction, the subject is at the
same time him or herself and the being in
which he or she participates. (Cortazar 1994a,
272; 1996, 519)
Participation, then, for Julio is more than just a
way of relating. It also by its contrast with to
know in the passage above suggests a way of
relating that facilitates a form of understanding.
Participation so understood takes as its point
of departure the assumption that there is
an essential inter-being of the things that
make up that world. Participation suggests
that we might get ourselves into better relations
with that world if we stopped thinking of
ourselves as outside of it. Or to put it another
way, if we stopped trying to get ourselves
outside of it.
Julio wouldnt be alone in adopting this
perspective. I think Gilles Deleuze was after
something similar when he developed the idea of
becoming. To become, he asserts,
is never to imitate, or to do like, nor to
conform to a model, whether its of justice or
of truth . . . One and the same becoming, a
single bloc of becoming, or, . . . an a-parallel
evolution of two beings who have nothing
whatsoever to do with one another. (Deleuze
and Parnet 23)
1
Becoming could be among other things a
way to talk about knowing as participation
without splitting things up into subjects and
objects. This view of becoming, Im sure, guided
Deleuze when he wrote about other authors. So
when he tells me to Think of the author you are
writing about. Think of him so hard that he can
no longer be an object, and equally so that you
cannot identify with him (Deleuze and Parnet
119). I take him to be encouraging me into a
becoming with the author, an understanding
without or beyond subjects and objects.
200
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Something like Julios walk with John Keats
perhaps.
2
2
In Julios work this basic way of seeing our being
and knowing in this world that I have been calling
participation derives from something that struck
him repeatedly in his studies of Keats: the sense
or awareness of the porosity of the membranes
separating him from the people and things
around him, and those things and people from
each other. Over the course of his correspon-
dence, Keats lets drop time and again a certain
notion that returns and is formulated in relation
to concrete cases that worry him: the notion of
being invaded by the personality of those who
surround him (Cortazar 1996, 490). This idea is
everywhere in this book: Keats as a kind of
ecstatic chameleon, broken-up in his encounters
with the world. Keats poems are just the diary of
the trip.
This sense of permeability, this compassion
(feeling with), lies at the bottom of that
attitude toward citation that Julio expresses here
in the Keats book for the first time in writing: if
I quote because I want to (Si cito porque me da
la gana) and not to impress or dominate its
because the wanting gives me the quotes (es que
la gana me da las citas). When the little-stick-
that-speaks begins to do so for another, I respect
that habitation of a spirit that uses me to repeat
itself, to return from its tomb. Voracity of the
poet that overflows his own books, invading alien
ones (Cortazar 1996, 19). Some time later, hell
say this again, at the beginning of Around the
Day in Eighty Worlds:
You may have noticed the quotes raining
down, and thats nothing compared to what
will follow (that is, almost everything). In the
eighty worlds of my trip around the day there
are harbors, hotels, and beds for Cronopios,
and besides, in quoting others we cite
ourselves, its been said and done more than
a few times, only pedants quote to be correct,
whereas Cronopios quote because they are
terrible egotists and they want to gather their
friends together . . . Robert Lebel, for example,
who described this book perfectly when he
said: Everything you see in this room, or in
fact in this building, was left here by the
previous tenants. So you wont find much that
pertains to me, yet I prefer these random
appurtenances. Their diversity keeps me from
being limited to a single mode of reflection;
and in this laboratory, whose resources I have
systematically inventoried (with the opposite
of the conventional valuation, of course), my
imagination is less inclined to measure its
steps. Which is something I know it would
have taken me more words to say. (Cortazar
1986c, 7)
It turns out that Lebel, whom Julio cites here, is
himself citing Marcel Duchamp, and the whole
thread of borrowed words leads Julio to affirm
the relation between such joyful, friendly citation
and that sense of substantiality, the being alive
that lacks in so many of our books, that writing
and breathing (in the Indian sense of breathing as
the ebb and flow of the universal being) not be
two different rhythms (Cortazar 1986c, 7). And
it is worth remembering that the Spanish word
cita, that Julio uses here for quotation, also
means encounter or meeting, as in the concrete
actualization of a relation.
So this attitude toward citation echoes Julios
method of chronicling his walk with Keats, that is
to say his record of the moving relations that is
their walk together. Gilles Deleuze explained in
an interview why he wrote about David Hume
and the empiricist philosophers. They made, he
said, a vital discovery, the certainty of life
which, if one really adheres to it, changes ones
way of life. It is that relations are external to
their terms (Deleuze and Parnet 55; original
emphasis).
3
Its the idea that relations between
things are not subordinate to those things.
Relations are just as much things as things.
Peter is smaller than Paul, The glass is on the
table: relation is neither internal to one of the
terms which would consequently be subject, nor
to two together (Deleuze and Parnet 55). They
have a life of their own, relations do, and so do
Julio and Keats, each made up of relations, and so
does the relation that is recorded in that book.
In this insight Deleuze finds a vital protest
against principles. Indeed, if one sees in it
something which runs through life, but which is
repugnant to thought, then thought must be
201
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forced to think it, one must make relations the
hallucination point of thought, an experimenta-
tion which does violence to thought. Empiricists
are not theoreticians, they are experimenters
(Deleuze and Parnet 55). This is because the
history of philosophy is encumbered with the
problem of being, IS (Deleuze and Parnet 56).
But the empiricists think with AND. For
Deleuze, to think with AND makes relations
shoot outside their terms and outside the set of
their terms, and outside everything which could
be determined as Being, One, or Whole
(Deleuze and Parnet 57). This all sounds too
technical and serious perhaps. Consider Deleuzes
thoughts as a way of describing what happens
when you step into the forest of Julios citational
encounters. Its really quite simple. Deleuzes
AND simply connects things, like us with the
world around us.
4
Dewey made connection the
foundation of his theory of experience and of art,
and cited John Keats attitude as a prime
example. As Deleuze says, with a tremendous,
earned simplicity: Try it, it is a quite extra-
ordinary thought, and yet it is life (Deleuze and
Parnet 57).
3
This all smacks of the tom-tom and mumbo
jumbo, and also sounds a little technical, but not
when you suspend routine and open yourself to
that permeability in which Antonin Artaud saw
the poetic act par excellence, the recognition of
the dynamic and internal destiny of thought
(Cortazar 1986b, 33). Indeed, in Julios world,
this basic way of seeing being and knowing that
I have been calling participation is constitutive
of creative power and what is life if not
the ceaseless manifestation of creative power, the
ceaseless production of the new? I love the
corridor for which this passage is the opening: an
extraordinary description that is also an example
of the poetic act par excellence, the process he
would elsewhere call invencion.
Invention is the name that Julio gives to
the process of creating something new by an
immanent rearrangement of the relations com-
prising something old: precisely the way that an
anagram makes a new word from an old word,
adding nothing from beyond (no transcendental-
ism), taking nothing away (no repression); merely
experimentally rearranging the relations among
the given elements (Colas). Here it is important
to recall that the etymological roots of invention
lead us to the Greek heuresis and so evoke the
image of stumbling upon something, encounter-
ing in short, a cita. Its versatile applicability to
generative processes ranging from physics to
biology to philosophy to literature partly explains
the vital urgency with which Horacio Oliveira, at
the beginning of Julios most famous novel
Hopscotch, announces that in an age in which
we run toward deception through infallible
equations and conformity machines, our
possible truth must be invention (nuestra
verdad posible tiene que ser invencion)
(Cortazar 1966, 38384).
When I read these words, Julio springs to life
and begins to give me advice, like a mentor or a
friend. He first suggests I create the conditions in
my life and my self: suspend routine and open
yourself to permeability. In another moment,
Julio will combine these in the simple counsel,
borrowed from Fred Astaire, to let yourself go.
Suspend routine, break habits. Like Henry Miller
staying up all night, forcing the body to lead the
way into the crack the always closing elevator
door through the sticky brick of habit
(sticky brick is what Julio called it in the
Preface to Cronopios and Famas; or the Great
Habit in chapter 73 of Hopscotch).
I look through dog-eared pages, souvenirs
from an earlier transformative journey through
Henry Millers Rosy Crucifixion, but the passage
Im looking for has slipped back, hiding in the
shadows of the hundreds of thousands of other
words. Instead perhaps they are in league with
each other and this is a diversionary tactic
another passage leaps out in front of me, waving
its arms, ears wiggling, laughing off the walls.
Speaking of the creative artist, Miller gives me
another way to think of the conditions essential
for the poetic act par excellence:
Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an
egotistical performance on the part of the
intellect. Through art, then, one finally
establishes contact with reality: that is the
202
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great discovery. Here all is play and inven-
tion . . . the world has not to be put in order:
the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put
ourselves in unison with this order, to know
what is the world order in contradistinction to
the wishful thinking orders which we seek to
impose on one another. The power which we
long to possess, in order to establish the good,
the true and the beautiful, would prove to be,
if we could have it, but the means of
destroying one another. It is fortunate that
we are powerless. We have first to acquire
vision, then discipline and forbearance . . . the
humility to acknowledge the existence of a
vision beyond our own . . . the great joy of the
artist is to become aware of a higher order of
things, to recognize by the compulsive and
spontaneous manipulation of his own impulses
the resemblance between human creation and
what is called divine creation. (Miller 213)
The humility of which Miller speaks, toward
which he prods me, is what Julio is after when he
says let yourself go. It is detention, understood
as a reflexive verb, as it is more commonly in
Spanish, to hold my self back. I try saying it like
this let your self go. Now I try it like this: let
your self go. Let it float away, my self, the name
given to the desire to order and impose cause and
effect. Maybe it works for certain purposes, but is
an absolute handicap for the sort of voyages Julio
and Henry are evoking here.
5
In Cronopios and
Famas, Julio gives Instructions on How to
Sing. They begin like this: Begin by breaking
all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to
your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget
yourself (Cortazar 1969a, 7). Can we let our
self wither, like yellow leaves that any slight
stirring of the air takes off a tree (Nietzsche
244). This humility can only be achieved, as
anything else, through practice and repetition.
Now, with the essential conditions in place,
I can relish the gorgeous vision that comprises
the poetic act par excellence. This vision
consists in a perceptual or physical and very
often non-linear rearrangement of preexisting
elements so as to release the secret connections
(think with AND!) they have with each other
and with us. First Julio describes the intuition of
archaic, magical origin that there are phenomena,
even physical objects, that are what they are and
the way they are because, in some sense they also
are or could be other phenomena and other
things. Julio might want to call this archaic,
magical, or intuitive, but if it is, something very
similar is todays most advanced model of life
itself. All members of an ecological community
are interconnected in a vast and intricate network
of relationships, the web of life. They derive their
essential properties and, in fact, their very
existence from their relationships to other
things (Capra 298). Now, what but dead
knowing and lifeless writing could issue from a
position staked on denying or fleeing such
relationships? Indeed, how can we call ourselves
alive if we resist such relationships?
Perhaps such a vision seems fantastic. But
Henry Miller explains why we might be tempted
to give it that name. In works of fantasy the
existence of law manifesting itself through order
is even more apparent than in other works of
art. And how beautiful. Im brimming with joy.
How extraordinary that Henry should have leaped
to my ear to speak of fantasy when I am walking
slowly through the works of Julio Cortazar.
Perhaps the fact that Julios vision was com-
pletely in tune with what we now see as the nature
of life itself isnt life fantastic? explains why
someone like Henry Miller could enjoy in such a
vision the mysteriously healthful effects of an
elixir. Miller again: Such a creation, which is
nothing less than pure invention, pervades all
levels, creating, like water its level. Now another
constellation explodes into view before my eyes.
First, theres that word: invention. But Henry
also draws a line connecting that word with the
action of water which, as the Tao Te Ching
observes, touches the ten thousand things and
does not strive (Lao Tsu Eight). Pure process.
Something, Henry now concludes, is present
in works of fantasy, which can only be likened to
an elixir. This mysterious element, often referred
to as pure nonsense, (tom-tom and mumbo-
jumbo?) brings with it the flavor of that longer
and utterly impenetrable world in which we and
all the heavenly bodies have their being.
Henry has indeed shot me back among the
stars, now the stars of other people who have
written and thought about inventing secret
connections. The world, Julio once wrote,
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is a badly resolved problem if it does not
contain, in some part of its diversity, the
encounter of each thing with all the others.
The poet, he continued, if she cannot connect
them by intrinsic features, does what everyone
does when looking at the stars: she invents the
constellation, the lines linking the solitary stars
(Cortazar 1996, 30102). We make the constella-
tion by inventing. Im inventing constellations,
making a road by walking around among the
solitary stars of words Julios, Millers,
Deleuzes. And perhaps a reader will traverse
some of these paths and see these patterns. But
maybe also, without meaning to, I will expose a
previously hidden cloud of stars and the reader
will then have the joy of inventing her own turtle
or bear. But I cant know or guarantee that. I can
only take the leap of faith up among these stars
and hope that you will join me.
Any point of a rhizome can be connected to
any other, and must be. These are the principles
of connection and heterogeneity (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 7). A rhizome is what started me
on this walk, the rhizome comprised of Julios
writing-walking Keats. I dont want to squeeze
that rhizome into the framework of a single
unifying thesis. Id rather leap from star to star.
Its okay if I get upside-down or change falls out
of my pockets. Itll wind up somewhere and so
will I.
4
Critical to the kind of creativity that flows from
seeing ourselves as participating in being con-
ceived as a multiplicity of relations composed of
more relations and so on all the way down is
letting go of our usual way of thinking of
language as offering us a representation or picture
of the world. Instead, we might do better if we
were to understand language as one of the tools
we have for bringing forth of creating, that is,
or inventing a congenial set of relations between
the bits of the multiplicity we usually call I and
the bits we usually call the world.
Paradoxically, the vitalism Deleuze finds in
the work of art derives from the artists intimacy
with death: What little health they possess is
often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or
neurosis, but because they have seen something
in life that is too much for anyone, too much for
themselves, and that has put on them the quiet
mark of death. But this something is also the
source or breath that supports them (Deleuze
and Guattari 1994, 172). Is it an accident that
Julio was unhealthy and, according to most who
knew him, had a strangely vital relationship to
death? That his wide infant eyes witnessed the
beginning of a century marked by incomprehen-
sible levels of deaths? Julio himself understood
the intimacy of life and death: precisely because
deep down I am a very optimistic and very vital
person, that is someone who believes in life as
profoundly as possible, the notion of death is also
very strong in me (Cortazar 1978, 28). Deleuzes
assertion concerning the vital function of art
might provide another way of understanding
teaching and learning to live better (the only
solution that Julio could offer to the over-
whelming mark of death in his century):
6
to
elude the bars of the self and the personal and the
organism in order to unleash the flow of life.
Why do Julio and his characters like to play at
shuffling heterogeneous elements until they dis-
cover or invent a secret subterranean homogen-
eity that links them and lights them up into
pleasing neon constellations? Maybe because, in
their vision of life, we are ourselves nothing more
than just such elements, shuffled into figures and
arrays and patterns. Juan exclaims: Oh, to give
in to that moving framework of instantaneous
nets, to accept ones place in the deck, to consent
to whatever shuffles and deals, what a tempta-
tion (Cortazar 1973, 42). Invention now displays
another one of its effects. Now you can see that
invention lets us see, and even manipulate in
miniature, the dynamic of those inexplicable,
barely describable anti-laws that, our habitual
attachment to the idea of a sovereign ego
notwithstanding, might be governing our lives.
Morelli says these anti-laws work beyond reason
and description. But he does not mean that words
cannot evoke these. Far from it. Indeed, if Morelli
is right, then this also helps to explain why Julio
so often identifies invention with poetry (in its
etymological sense of making). True, language
cannot represent those magical forces they move
and shift much too quickly and chaotically
204
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for language. But language can generate when
its symbolic, rhetorical, and expressive dimen-
sions are emphasized or deployed verbal
iterations of what that something does with
the heterogeneous elements including human
beings that make up the universe. Language
can, in short, create real relations.
Think, Italo Calvino encourages us
what it would be to have a work conceived
from outside the self, a work that would let us
escape the limited perspective of the individ-
ual ego, not only to enter into selves like our
own, but to give speech to that which has
no language, to the bird perching on the edge
of the gutter, to the tree in fall, to stone, to
cement, to plastic . . . Was this not perhaps
what Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote about
the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius
was aiming at when he identified himself with
that nature common to each and everything.
(Calvino 124)
Julio gives us such a work, he gives it to us the
way you give a friend a cold, or joy: so that they
have it too.
It comes from that chameleonic quality,
something he admired deeply in Keats for
whom, as for Basho: to know something is to
participate in it in some way (Cortazar 1986a,
147). The little boy in The Poisons knows this:
I liked to throw myself face down on the
ground and to smell the earth, feeling it
underneath me, warm with its smell of
summer so different from other times. I
thought of many things, but above all of the
ants, now that I had seen what the anthills
were I stayed thinking of the tunnels that criss-
crossed all over the place and that nobody saw.
Like the veins in my legs, that you could
barely distinguish below my skin, but full of
ants and mysteries that came and went.
(Cortazar 1994c, 305)
Deleuze observes that:
the kind of physical movements you find in
sports are changing. We got by for a long time
with an energetic conception of motion, where
theres a point of contact, or we are the source
of movement. Running, putting the shot, and
so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point,
a lever. But nowadays we see movement
defined less and less in relation to a point of
leverage. All the new sports surfing, wind-
surfing, hang-gliding take the form of
entering into an existing wave. Theres no
longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of
putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get
taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column
of rising air, to get into something instead
of being the origin of an effort. (Deleuze 1995,
121)
Maybe this helps explain the difference between
Petrone, or someone like him, and La Maga
(or the woman in La puerta condenada) and
people like them. The apparently exceptional
in Julios universe works like the wind or the
motion of the waves, even like gravity.
When people like Petrone become aware of
that force or movement, their thoughts and
deeds strive to apply energy and resistance,
opposition, to subdue it. But the woman in
the story, or La Maga, or the children in
Silvia, they are different, they surf, or
hang-glide, they seek to enter into that surprising
order of things.
5
Which is another way of saying they understand
and are capable of love. Love, writes Thomas
Merton,
demands a complete inner transformation
. . . We have to become, in some sense, the
person we love. And this involves a kind of
death of our being, our own self. No matter
how hard we try, we resist this death: we fight
back with anger, with recriminations, with
demands, with ultimatums. We seek any
convenient excuse to break off and give up
the difficult task. (Merton 1960, 1819)
No wonder Petrone went running. This experi-
ment can be scary. I must accept what feels at
least at first like total vulnerability (not that
my sense of self could ever truly protect me).
What if I am rejected? What if I am left alone
here? What if through the others eyes I see
that I must make changes? But the effect of
accepting this vulnerability is the rushing
feeling of tremendous growth, far beyond the
205
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dimensions permitted by a cramped and clinging
sense of self. Julio once tried to explain that
sexuality becomes invention at the moment that
one sees ones own pleasure as inseparable and
conditioned upon the pleasure of another
(Cortazar 1978, 69). I dont know if Julio himself
lived this way, though everyone Ive talked to
who knew him well agrees that he did, even when
they agree on little else. Certainly, much of his
writing exercises this capacity, explores it,
experiments with it, using and abusing rules of
grammar and syntax as a means of overcoming
the condition of the skinny, embarrassed cats.
And then invention comes back as the
discursive mode appropriate for love. For love,
Julio tells me, it would be easier for me to
communicate in language in the infectious,
moving way that others communicate in music
or kisses when I can give up my attachment to
language as a device for representing some thing
outside of it. I want to communicate that way
because communicating that way is the best way
to touch others and to be touched, to come
together with others in language. Without that
kind of communication, whether I am using
language or music or kisses, I am alone (even
if I dont seem to be) with a whole canefield
of words grown up between me and others
(Cortazar 1966, 95).
But Julio, describing a certain Lucas theory of
communication, suggests that there is another
way for Bruno and Horacio and myself to
communicate with our angels without giving up
our beloved words:
as rarefied as the air of his writing might be, as
much as some thing can only come and go
with great difficulty, Lucas never ceases to
verify whether the coming is valid and whether
the going takes place without major obstacles.
Little he cares about the individual situation of
the readers, because he believes in a myster-
iously multiform measurement that in the
majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and
thats why it isnt necessary to give ground in
either the coming or the going: between him
and others there will be a bridge as long as
what is written is born of a seed and not
a graft. In his most delirious inventions
theres something that at the same time is
so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy.
Its not a matter of writing for others but
for oneself, but oneself must also be the
others . . . (Cortazar 1984, 1617)
If we could see words this way: not as snapshots
of things but as things themselves, coming and
going, that touch people, that produce effects,
the way that kisses and music make you shiver or
laugh or dance, then perhaps our words would
carry the germ of life, infecting and enriching
our angels. Perhaps then, instead of caging
ourselves our angels having flown in verbal
representation, we might build
bridges connecting us with our
angels. Perhaps, then, we
could really come, change,
and stay together.
notes
I wouldlike to thank Charles Stivale for the stimu-
lus and invitation that gave rise to this particular
article, and Felicity Colman for her tireless,
generous, tender, and effective editorial work on
the essay.
1 See also Deleuze (1983, 19^25) and Deleuze
(1992, 169^86).
2 This same point is elaborated from the
two apparently very different perspectives
of Catholic mysticism and American pragmatism
by Thomas Merton (1993, 143^44) and John
Dewey (1917, 31). Both encourage that we view
knowing more as the event that punctuates a
successful process of intelligent mixing with the
world.
3 And see also, for a more extended discussion,
Deleuze (1991, 21^36, 85^104).
4 See also Dewey (1980,13^34), who makes Keats
his prime exemplar of this connective stance.
Also, for a view of relation as one of the defining
conditions of life, see Capra (36^50, 158^59,
298^99).
5 For a broader consideration of the cultural
inflections of this kind of thinking see Batchelor
(37^68) and Heidegger.
6 In Unos de tantos d|

as en Saignon (Corta zar

1969b, 22^27).
206
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Santiago Colas
Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures
4108 Modern Languages Building
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275
USA
E-mail: scolas@umich.edu
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