Sorting

Going through boxes of notes and came across a single page date 19/05/90 written in French about a Quebecoise author, Louky Bersianik giving a reading and ending the reading with a poem from an anthology about a killer's rampage that resulted in the death of fourteen women at the Ecole Polytechnique.

The note dwelt on detail. She closed the book as she was reading the last verse and put it aside as if to say voilà it's done. What struck me was that the poem suspended a final image for consideration: a brother and a sister going through the same door -- an image altogether absent from her work until now.

The note asks: what does it mean? The image and the gesture.

And in the same colour of ink below the note is an excerpt from Montaigne's Essays (Book I Chap. iii)

Nous ne sommes jamais chez nous; nous sommes toujours audelà

Never home always beyond.

Today I respectfully fold the note along the major of its creases (it bears the marks of having been kept in a pocket). The verso is blank. And I set the paper aside; the weight of the paper still lingering like an after-touch in the empty hand...


And so for day 44
27.01.2007