I Have Not A Desire But A

To Know That One Does Not Write For The Other, To Know That These Things I Am Going To Write Will Never Cause Me To Be Loved By The One I Love (the Other), To Know That Writing Compensates For Nothing, Sublimates Nothing, That It Is Precisely There Where You Are Not--this Is The Beginning Of Writing.

For Me The Noise Of Time Is Not Sad: I Love Bells, Clocks, Watches — And I Recall That At First Photographic Implements Were Related To Techniques Of Cabinetmaking And The Machinery Of Precision: Cameras, In Short, Were Clocks For Seeing, And Perhaps In Me Someone Very Old Still Hears In The Photographic Mechanism The Living Sound Of The Wood.

There Is Only One Way Left To Escape The Alienation Of Present Day Society: To Retreat Ahead Of It.

For Death Must Be Somewhere In A Society; If It Is No Longer (or Less Intensely) In Religion, It Must Be Elsewhere; Perhaps In This Image Which Produces Death While Trying To Preserve Life. Contemporary With The Withdrawal Of Rites, Photography May Correspond To The Intrusion, In Our Modern Society, Of An Asymbolic Death, Outside Of Religion, Outside Of Ritual, A Kind Of Abrupt Dive Into Literal Death.

The Text Is A Tissue Of Quotations Drawn From The Innumerable Centres Of Culture.