Halfway through Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk, in the middle of the night, I read about Filip Verheyen, seventeenth century anatomist, ancestor of Oliver Sacks, and Borges, and me, who writes letters to his amputated leg, preserved in formaldehyde.
Why am I in pain? Is it because .... in essence body and soul are part of something larger and something shared, states of the same substance, like water that can be both liquid and solid? How can what does not exist cause me pain? Why do I feel this lack, sense this absence? Are we perhaps condemned to wholeness, and every fragmentation, every quartering, will only be a pretence, will happen on the surface, underneath which, however, the plan remains intact, unalterable? Does even the smallest fragment still belong to the whole? If the world, like a great glass orb, falls and shatters into a million pieces — doesn't something great, powerful and infinite remain a whole in this?
I read this over and over.
Am I doing the right thing by telling stories? Wouldn't it be better to fasten my mind with a clip, tighten the reins and express myself not by means of stories and histories, but with the simplicity of a lecture, where in sentence after sentence a single thought gets clarified, and then others are tacked onto it in the succeeding paragraphs? I could use quotes and footnotes. I could in the order of points or chapters reap the consequences of demonstrating step by step what I mean; I would verify an aforementioned hypothesis and ultimately be able to carry off my arguments like sheets after a wedding night, in view of the public. I would be mistress of my own text, I could take an honest per-word payment for it.
His leg does not write back.
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