Margaret Allen
14-03-2006, 09:55 AM
One or more letters are excluded from a written work. The most famous example is Perec's novel, A Void, where no e appears. The same restriction is followed in this tribute to Perec, written soon after his death.
In a pinch you can always say GP, but you will find no way of naming him fully in a situation such as this. Still, calling to mind many various ways in which words found distinction at his hands, I think it is not unfitting to discuss him in this particular fashion, which is, in truth, a product of loss; and you and I know that loss is what now is most vivid about him, so that honoring him in a form issuing wholly from loss looks, to my instinct, right. And with this odd constraint braking what I might call our train of imagination, you and I can start on our trip; a trip into a domain - part thinking back, part anticipation, part hallucination (but strong in actuality for all that) - in which all is form, and form is drawn from abstraction, or spirit. Our trip may start by taking us through hills of sorrow, so harsh that as you climb your sight will almost vanish from pain of crying; it may thrust us into swamps of disgust, of hating our condition as unfair; it may push us across dry plains of frustration, on which angry shadows distract our will with shouts of anguish, adjuring us to abandon our hoping (and who can avoid hoping?) as it has no goal. But at last you will approach - almost straying into it, as if stumbling backwards into lost, familiar surroundings - you will approach and pass into that first vast wood into which I was born with you, with its bluish light, its floor of moss, its soothing air, its roof of tangling boughs. You will sit down in that sanctuary and find your consolation. You will now know that our world is not forlorn, that all is around you to fashion again into what you want and always did want, out of that abundant fountain that is our origin - that flowing, that light, that flux of light that wrought us into living things. You will not find him; but you will find what it is that struck him out of night, and you with him. You will know this world as a world that is full, as a world from which nothing is cast out, including that which is lost for always; and lastly you will find jubilation abounding, in colossal calm.
In a pinch you can always say GP, but you will find no way of naming him fully in a situation such as this. Still, calling to mind many various ways in which words found distinction at his hands, I think it is not unfitting to discuss him in this particular fashion, which is, in truth, a product of loss; and you and I know that loss is what now is most vivid about him, so that honoring him in a form issuing wholly from loss looks, to my instinct, right. And with this odd constraint braking what I might call our train of imagination, you and I can start on our trip; a trip into a domain - part thinking back, part anticipation, part hallucination (but strong in actuality for all that) - in which all is form, and form is drawn from abstraction, or spirit. Our trip may start by taking us through hills of sorrow, so harsh that as you climb your sight will almost vanish from pain of crying; it may thrust us into swamps of disgust, of hating our condition as unfair; it may push us across dry plains of frustration, on which angry shadows distract our will with shouts of anguish, adjuring us to abandon our hoping (and who can avoid hoping?) as it has no goal. But at last you will approach - almost straying into it, as if stumbling backwards into lost, familiar surroundings - you will approach and pass into that first vast wood into which I was born with you, with its bluish light, its floor of moss, its soothing air, its roof of tangling boughs. You will sit down in that sanctuary and find your consolation. You will now know that our world is not forlorn, that all is around you to fashion again into what you want and always did want, out of that abundant fountain that is our origin - that flowing, that light, that flux of light that wrought us into living things. You will not find him; but you will find what it is that struck him out of night, and you with him. You will know this world as a world that is full, as a world from which nothing is cast out, including that which is lost for always; and lastly you will find jubilation abounding, in colossal calm.