We Don't Forget, But Something Vacant Settles

It Is As If The Photograph Always Carries Its Referent With Itself, Both Affected By The Same Amorous Or Funereal Immobility, At The Very Heart Of The Moving World: They Are Glued Together, Limb By Limb, Like The Condemned Man And The Corpse In Certain Tortures; Or Even Like Those Pairs Of Fish (sharks, I Think, According To Michelet) Which Navigate In Convoy, As Though United By An Eternal Coitus.

How Does Meaning Get Into The Image? Where Does It End? And If It Ends, What Is There Beyond?

I Want To Be Both Pathetic And Admirable, I Want To Be At The Same Time A Child And An Adult. Thereby I Gamble, I Take A Risk: For It Is Always Possible That The Other Will Simply Ask No Question Whatever About These Unaccustomed Glasses; That The Other Will See, In The Fact, No Sign.

I Want A History Of Looking. For The Photograph Is The Advent Of Myself As Other: A Cunning Dissociation Of Consciousness From Identity. Even Odder: It Was Before Photography That Men Had The Most To Say About The Vision Of The Double. Heautoscopy Was Compared With An Hallucinosis; For Centuries This Was A Great Mythic Theme.

...what I Enjoy In A Narrative Is Not Directly Its Content Or Even Its Structure, But Rather The Abrasions I Impose Upon The Fine Surface: I Read On, I Skip, I Look Up, I Dip In Again. Which Has Nothing To Do With The Deep Laceration The Text Of Bliss Inflicts Upon Language Itself, And Not Upon The Simple Temporality Of Its Reading.