“I would love to dream of time” Excerpts from An Absence of Sea — Christina Tudor-Sideri

at the far end of the world nestled in the time of a dream the longing for a good night a good life a good passage on the river through the forest inside the heart may time continue to pass we say not in gusts but with the gentle touch of a summer breeze and so begins this letter in fragments thus words adrift unknowing of themselves make the text the body of this letter to you who are but wind but passage but sea the rumbling of waves time against nature other languages temps in all languages

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at the far end of the world the dreamer dreams she has your face your eyes and through her hair have passed your hours 

there was a time before the soul she remembers it well a white time not the white of light or purity but white like paint that never fully dries forever glinting the whiteness of absence the bed now also white painted iron cold beneath her body the ceiling trembling with heat and silence inside her not yet a soul nothing perhaps just this the distant voice of the sea an off season coastal town empty boardwalks shuttered kiosks the hum of silence where music once played gulls circling vacant promenades salt and stillness in the air no soul not yet they say it comes at forty days or eighty or in the moment of the first cry but she has never cried and yet she hopes it could be tonight yes tonight the ceiling fan will stop the clock will melt in its ticking she feels it something moving quietly without warning like thirst or music it does not speak it waits the wind starts from the east and now she walks along a dry canal past the mill of her childhood past the dead into the fields the soul she thinks she has no name for it a thought unuttered the already and the not yet she will never be alone she thinks not while carrying this absence not in forgetting and not in death not in the silence between bodies perhaps this is ensoulment she thinks not miracle not science not even soul but this to carry this absence this unbearable fact of being she walks until the fields are no longer fields until there is sea again she walks in the shadows in the suggestion of grass and stone and water that does not move but remembers movement she stops by the cracked wall veins of stone where lizards lived endlessly nothing but stone for hours and hours she thinks and still she does not move she presses her hand against it against this wall and it is warm like skin warm like bodies lingering in the sun for too long she closes her eyes and sees again the first breath the first step not hers but someone’s not the soul’s the soul has no breath of its own it takes hers a breath she never meant to give but no one asked her it is like being seen from inside she thinks something but not eyes perhaps a hand inside the chest not touching not hurting just knowing she walks again the wind blows colder as if in moving she took something from the air she crosses a bridge and remembers her double all the doubles the woman who said there is no soul there is but a weight and a very small one for that matter not permanent nothing to concern herself with nothing she could keep where she is going nothing that could breach impermanence she returns to the bridge she leans on the railing the water dark wide still a river now she hears it whispers not words but something older than language she asks really who could you be and it does not answer but it remains that is enough she thinks remaining companionship shall we keep going she asks her double by the sea now she walks until the fields have disappeared again until the air has changed the ground unfamiliar dust replaced by something metallic or rain the sky a ceiling without depth pouring on her she stops by the old cracked wall again presses her hand again it is warm disturbingly warm as if someone were living inside a myth she thinks the warmth makes her think again of the moment the soul enters the body not hers not entirely she carries void without sound without force without asking talking void the smallest of voids its breath unnoticed in her no language no words no inside after all only being no longer alone something else someone else with her now within like memory like desire she remembers another woman another bridge another double Cortazar’s Alina Reyes she leans on the bridge the sea no longer there the river unmoving she asks it again and again really who could you be and there is no answer but it remains companionship water nothing is more beautiful than water Tarkovsky comes to mind she trusts her life to water and eternity herself a poem perhaps not Hauge’s in this staying of the river she feels the world shifting ever slightly she feels the stillness mirrors the stillness inside something settled but not peace not surrender perhaps an end of wanting no but not the soul either something silent no voice no expectation something someone with her always unnoticed she pauses always pausing always walking her hand on the cracked wall always warmth from within she walks back now the same road different quieter there are trees now other stones she remembers a wait a way house horizons pale flat dim skies windows dark doors open no one comes no one walks beside her no one wonders why she steps like this why she touches the wall every time she comes round to it at home a table chairs unwashed cups the bedroom sheets crumpled the soul nowhere nothing changed she has returned as she always does she sits now hands folded quiet not tired but with eyes closed the soul wants stillness she thinks waiting for something the faint hum of electricity behind the walls of the apartment makes her open her eyes light shifts from soft gold to schism blue she kneels on the floor touching the floorboards they are rough to the touch but warm she remembers her wall here in her warm house she remembers more a time before the soul something akin to truth not given but uncovered slowly painfully she shifts her body space returns to where she just was light fades almost imperceptibly the sun retreats the room darkens in layers time unfolds like breath one breath after another she does not move she does not turn she does not close her eyes night comes and answers she thinks yes perhaps tonight perhaps tonight is different she can feel it already something in the air a different texture a memory something with weight something to grasp to recognize she lies down but she does not sleep she listens to sounds from everywhere the creaking wood from other homes sighs the distant wind a dog barking silence the dark itself pulse heart body everything all this necessary at night necessary as night in the morning she listens still the quiet hum of the world beginning birds clatter the radio playing something distant herself not absent not asleep her body folded deep inside the world inside her apartment in her bed under crumpled sheets inside of something like breath at rest she moves bare feet touch objects fabrics glass on the floor nothing changed and yet somehow the world has softened she thinks the body accepts this and carries on almost invisible almost like a secret something living in an apartment in a home without anyone knowing it rhythm in tune with the world outside not seeking not asking just being here inside like the soul inside the heart she stays at home today there is no urgency to touch the wall nothing but the slow unfolding of time lost time by the window gazing at distant faces trees diffuse light uncertain rays she watches and thinks of perception of being body in the here and now of chairs of glasses of the cool air on her skin on the bridge her double everyone’s double all there at the same time silent invisible quiet enough as not to bother her this illusion the outside inside the inside outside being with everything at once with everyone being everywhere not in the metaphysical old way but immanent this folded sensation meaning gesture maybe the soul a continual something the forming of an echo that changes that touches a hand inside the chest not heart but place there where language fails where she breaks down porous silent always exposed vulnerable under the gaze of the other exposure rupture fabric the sheets crumpled tree leaves trembling aware watched by her window eye leaf the condition of being in time the relation between space and things and touch her touch from the drawer she pulls out a notebook she thinks she must write down her dream she pulls a pen and another a notebook and another folded paper old receipts she takes everything out slowly it no longer matters what she must empty it she must separate the silence of the object from the silence of the space table drawer window light she opens the notebook already almost full half thoughts sentences no subject no name no referent no dates everything already forgotten she reads without knowing what without trying to remember there is no need to know no need for meaning she turns page after page writing this down lines appear one after the other this dream of a time before the soul this she remembers its whiteness forever glinting

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how do you dream my love of what are there marionette strings attached to your fingers tightly tied does the doll feel them she who is without texture without skin without warmth she who cannot be touched perhaps in dreams you try in the late hours you reach for where was once contour and curve and all along you find this absence and you place there a row of selves your double too her him at times you don’t remember but you go on you give the past a past of many never anything but a past sometimes the other says no she won’t be mirrored she performs acts that are not your own not my own she knocks down memorabilia from the shelves she makes the curtains sway then you agree you say fine there must be an upcoming that can be given it cannot be that everywhere and anywhere lovers are prisoners there is a kiss behind the veil there is touch in the pages of history but it eludes us there must be something to be captured gently convinced to stay captured before its arrival before it comes a coming as ethereal as her the ghost the double the bather she who asks for time more time more presence excess hours herself as fleeting as breath on glass you wait regardless you hold out your hands as if to catch something already slipping through your fingers in doing so the path remains toward the offering toward the invisible weight of what you once refused you become yourself as you keep to this path yourself the ghost not all at once it happens slowly almost tenderly you fade you flicker your outline becomes smudged by longing by the attempt to reach what cannot be held and thus the haunting begins it is your absent contour now the ruin of another it is your echo pressed into the walls of someone else’s remembering your voice now distant your face behind the fabric underneath the kiss your step is heard but not found you have become unrest the sway of curtains the coolness that enters a room without anyone having opened the door it is now she who says fine there must be something and thus the cycle carries each becoming the ghost never both at the same time never both ethereal never both flesh each learning to live with this haunting that never ends only changes its name from I to you from you to I 

in a distant past or perhaps future we are lost in the magnitude of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe bewildered not by the figures not by nudeness but by its size the scale of the everyday before our eyes magnified silent so silent yet screaming at us from this conventional setting how can it be I remember thinking and still I think now that the rupture is not in the form not in the content but in the folding of time and gaze where the picnic becomes not a moment but a threshold a liminal expanse where meaning disintegrates under the weight of its own exposure as if the casualness of the scene were not casual at all but staged not staged in the theatrical sense but in the ontological sense a staging of being itself as if these bodies these trees this cloth were caught in a moment where representation collapsed and what was left was presence raw unresolved we saw the woman stare back not as object but as mirror as a wound in the continuum of history where the real and the artificial blend indistinguishably and in that blending we sensed our own unraveling our own complicity in the construction of sight and sense and so we stare back at Manet now in retrospect staring back through our eyes and realize it was never about the painting it was about the impossibility of ever feeling the same again 

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I ask for permission to sleep and not wake up says Chantal Maillard her conscience is sadness on the threshold of herself she says I ask to fall asleep without joy and I wonder what kind of sleep would allow it what kind of sleep would permit death to die like this to become infinite in joy precisely because of its absence one can only fly with the body she writes the body condition of flight the body conclusion in the world and in the mind when the given must be given when there is no movement from one to the other without an offering when each absence is a continuous variation of itself then from one world to the next never earlier then at least one of us one of us living dying loving must fall to the ground and break into a rupture that resembles a cut a framing something cinematic the makings of a director of someone who comes and tells you where to position yourself in order to be the good that lifts the other to be the bad that brings her at the edge of life someone to instruct someone to give you words so you can utter them to teach you movement so you can walk again so you can gesture the act of giving the promise of that other land of those other eyes of the separation that unifies and I my love remain the ghost of pain the flame of desire tangled in your veins I hold the space where your breaking becomes creation where your silence becomes song where your brokenness becomes the architecture of a becoming you will learn to move not as you once did but as you must now move as one who carries absence like a gift like a wound like a promise whispered between breaths between shadows between the moments when everything trembles dearest I say in other words in other texts dearest only your voice will remain

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the landscapes age the rivers forget the trees lose their leaves as you lose yours and still it holds you the world the world without story without center without end the world that dies with you and goes on without you

myself I cannot go on my love without tracing the contours of all others of all else without slipping into their silences their longings their drive their eyes them who now live between the words in the markings of books I have consumed like breath I cannot speak of the self of the double of the dreamer of her of myself without speaking of those who haunt me but in the space between them you emerge and dissolve and emerge again at times a name on the edge of this place an ache of memory the taste of absence the weight of bodies never fully known other times something carved from darkness from all the nights that I have walked alone accompanied by the echoes of trains that leave me trembling still I ask you now to understand the pull of all that I have lived and read and lost of all that I have become in these words to please see in these fleeting moments that are never enough to capture fire to gather water in this tangled web of stories most of whom remain untold where truth is carved on my skin by the words of others tempête anamnèse the tiny snake coiled on my finger taken by the sea I find myself here in the spaces between one silence and another yours and mine my double’s and mine in the quiet of this room I find myself dissolving into the walls the air the things we’ve touched and left behind this cruel poetry of fleeting proximity contours never fully align drawn together by the nameless force that not even language can grasp like ghosts half known half feared half possessed love between like a terrible act of becoming something that slips through our hands in the very moment we grasp it the skin of a dream if two gazes look into each other’s eyes can one then say that they are touching Jacques Derrida asks

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when I write of the night of the train of other times and other lives it is still something that cannot be grasped it is still a trace of experience fleeting silhouettes of life of moments the marks of something that has already slipped beyond the grasps of memory and when I write of these things to you my love I am also writing to them to those who have been to those who never were to those who have stood where you stand now who have kept the spaces warm these spaces that you walk through pacing reading disagreeing to lovers in the margins their bodies long since dust their voices carried away on the same wind that carried me here before this page in this writing I trace them alongside you their absence made palpable by the threads of memory which I must unravel in order to go on I write to the woman who leaned against the cold stone wall of the library one winter evening years ago eyes distant as those gazing between realms hovering just out of reach of any kind of attachment to the here and now her too always becoming always moving through layers of other people through the words of death through long forgotten conversations in marginalia and in letters she loved in order to dissolve herself she said to lose herself in the fold of another’s language of another’s story I saw in her the ghost of a Parisian poet someone who takes death and holds it tightly in her arms I write to the man who would sit in cafés and read Sartre aloud he said words are the only thing that might save him from the hollow ache the world leaves inside of him when we spoke of love it was surgical philosophical dissected reasoned but with trembling hands I write to fleeting literary figures to Albertine and Beatrice to Ava Klein and Emma Bovary to unnamed narrators and forgotten characters always vanishing before one could truly hold them in memory I write to lovers in books who like ourselves are always searching always reaching always touching at the very edge of touch I write and the letter becomes an extension of the places where my heart has torn itself open where it has been remade by words and hands and fainting gestures of love I write isolated and from the midst of crowds I write letters to other letters long meandering through the epistolary history of the world in search for just the right you for just the right way to address you now my love I write now when there is no distinction anymore between my body and theirs flesh and bone bodies literary bodies art museum pieces bodies of lovers of doubles of water in desire in memory in the abyss I write to say I see that what binds us is not the promise of completion but the impossibility of ever being whole for what is to desire if not to remain eternally incomplete 

I write to the quiet lovers the ones less celebrated the ones forgotten to one and all the others to those lost in the folds of texts never meant to remain never remembered never preserved to a collection of what is lost what is engulfed by the dark to the imagined the idealized to ideas and desires to distances that will never be closed I write to say that time is the great ruin that we must all inhabit the ruin that gnaws at the edges of everything that erodes the very ground beneath our feet to say that time is the great beauty the very act of becoming through decay through disappearance to say that time is gap and space in between that time is my reflection always slipping away always becoming another 

think of the ruins of ancient cities their walls crumbling their statues half buried beneath the weight of centuries and the touches of all who have loved vestiges not as the remains of something that was once whole but as the evidence of passage the evidence of the world’s refusal to remain fixed think of the stories they tell the shattered columns the broken arches the story of what is no longer of what time has devoured and scattered think of galleries and weathered portraits of chipped frames and paint dulled by the years of faces in deterioration staring at us still alive still in their ruin think of us humans always becoming always dissolving think of us bodies that will decay minds that will forget souls that will no longer be it is there that our true form rests in the process of becoming of disappearance yes created and destroyed in time perhaps fortunate enough to become trace to become fragment to become ruin 

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in another dream there are boats once slender carved from pine or fir lashed tight with linen soaked in pitch their ribs visible like the anatomy of some creature made to breathe across the surface of the Aegean not to conquer but to carry the weight of gods of men of olives amphorae fish and sometimes silence what matters now is not the inventory but the drift the persistence of movement without urgency triremes limbs in rhythm each stroke not labor but ritual synchronized breath beneath bronze helmets the rowers often unseen as if the sea moved on its own and still I do not recall them to reconstruct I do not want to speak of battles but of how the hull cut the water at dawn the color of it neither blue nor gray but something in between a surface that does not mirror but absorbs and the wind in its shifting carried messages across miles not in sound but in salt the mast creaking like an ancient voice trying to be remembered and if I speak now of boats of dreaming boats it is not to locate history but to remain near it to move with it not forward but along its edges as if memory were maritime and the past a coastline we never quite land upon only drift beside wave after wave none of them new all of them insistent if I write now of boats I write as declaration only as continuation the hand moving because it remembers the dark of dreams not as absence but as condition the writing does not distinguish between its addressees to you to myself to no one it begins and never ends it is not addressed it is endured whole years pass and seconds open like rooms with no corners and I remain in both I have been writing since before the shape of writing appeared since before form since before language remember the pen in my hand the photograph in black and white an infant still when perception itself was the script and the gaze the only sentence possible the world came to me not in names but as surfaces and I inscribed it not on paper but where light meets the body sun against skin shadow against wall blue ink on white walls lilac walls the green of life a silent grammar of warmth and withdrawal this is not metaphor but memory or its trace or its remainder and what I write now is not new not even mine it is only the continuation of something begun the moment the dark of dreams first touched the eye to never again recede

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she stands at the edge of the sea the dreamer the bather my double her body draped in the shadow of the sinking sun and pulled toward the horizon toward the ever persistent call of water the wind tugs at her dress the air is thick with the unsaid her eyes fixed on the waves gazing into the depths of the sea searching as if for something buried beneath its surface something that will slip through her fingers the moment she thinks she might have grasped it she cannot touch the water or perhaps she does not want to but it consumes her nonetheless it pulls her ever closer ever deeper and there is now almost no space between the horizon and her gaze nothing but the rhythm of the sea the steady pulse of time constant infinite impossible to hold in phenomenology there is intentionality aboutness every act is intentional talking about experience means to talk about the experience of something but being intentional when one seeks for instance the primordial link is not the same as being intentional in the midst of ordinary life being intentional in time being intentional before the darkness of the sea being intentional in the body and in dream so this is where the chasm between the mind engaging with theory and the mind engaging with itself widens the more it is observed the more one seeks the more one strives to create the intentional structure of consciousness that Husserl seared into our thinking minds the more it becomes the more conscious we are of it the easier it is to say it no longer exists it has been erased all there is now is the memory of it like that telephone that no longer rings in actuality yet one keeps hearing its ringing for we do not hear it like an echo we hear it like matter yet it has abandoned us to our theoretical pursuits like Lucian Blaga’s forests have abandoned us to the yearnings of dreams the forests that perhaps could grow but that will never ever be 

she stands before the sea she breathes in deep her lungs fill but not with air with absence with the emptiness that haunts every wave that lingers between each break on each rock emptiness that marks every movement of the tide her hands trembling with the knowledge that she will never reach this sea that the vastness of it will always exist somewhere beyond her just out of her grasp and so she longs to become one with it to be swallowed by it to disappear into its depths to lose herself in endless movement in the vast horizon the sea too a lover she stands there waiting as the sun sinks lower as the light begins to fade as the sea grows darker becoming even more desirable as night falls she listens for a moment to voices in the distance as darkness grows around her as the last traces of light vanish into the water feeling the weight of the night pressing against her now cold skin but there is no peace not even here nothing but a disquietude that rises like the tide a restlessness with no rhythm no clear beginning and no end so she shifts her gaze across the darkened water where the moonlight falls in silver traces pale and fleeting like the remnants of this dream she is having she breathes in deeply but the air does not fill her 

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she wakes in the half light of a foreign city a city whose streets she cannot name whose air she cannot breathe with ease the window is cracked open the noise of the city fills the room it is not the gentle pulse of the sea but a hum a dissonant symphony of city life the streets are awake alive in ways she is not yet familiar with their rhythm foreign a strange something that pulls at her like an unspoken promise there’s a bouquet of wilted flowers on the writing table torn in two that were always meant to be there on all tables in all rooms in all cities in all the stories she tells me stories that I then regale you with in everything I write this connection the thread the river that makes passage possible from page to page from year to year from life to life it is not unfathomable to think that it is only because of these flowers my love that I am able to form words only through their stems that my ink runs only because of their tint I am able to account for this letter for this dream for her presence in this city for poetry split open like a pomegranate its juices dripping down my fingers in profound synchronicity with how time passes when the heart slows its rhythm when the heart succumbs and you put your arm up for one last time not knowing what is the significance of this gesture whether you are calling out to someone or counting birds on the evening sky of Berlin 

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now especially now I believe it might all be possible 

to be wonderstruck to be smitten to be shaken to be lovesick to be stunned to be amazed o what a joy to be amazed by time by oceans by the wind to feel on my arm the text as you write it to saturate distance with everything to learn by heart to learn the heart to know the sea without end the sky without form the figure lost not before the world but after it after its retreat where vision unravels and the horizon no longer divides a Caspar David Friedrich imagery in infinite solitude by the sea writes Kleist of his monk not moving but exposed to an intimacy that cannot be held something akin to impermanence how paradoxical the work of art eternal and ever so fleeting how striking this nearness of what has no place no ground only the breathless suspension that draws all things toward the edge of their disappearance what a magnificent thing indeed to gaze off into a boundless watery waste where the horizon swallows the silence heavy not with absence but with too much presence too much of what cannot appear and yet compelling the gaze to linger where nothing begins where nothing ends only the tremor of the unseen brushing against the edge of all that refuses to be framed perhaps the truth in painting is this refusal to be framed and there in this refusal a figure always a figure not waiting not arriving but suspended in the erasure of time held in the thinning of perception the passepartout a point of connection to know from this that distance is not between things but within them where to look is to fall without falling and to be is already to be beyond oneself dissolved in the grain in the air the weight of the ungrasped where light that neither comes nor recedes but hovers indifferent intimate can guide one home to know all this to see the ground becoming thought idea that no longer holds neither itself nor yourself only in the echo of a name I say to you only there in the name never uttered but always implied in the wind in the blue of the sky and the grey of the grave there in the slow disintegration of the visible into what is neither image nor idea but the approach of a presence through its absence a presence that will not arrive and whose not arriving is everything there in the imaginary only there 

where time lingers in the crumbling of stones and memory seeps through broken arches the ruins of Eldena stretch not as remnants but as openings into something vaster than history for what is a ruin if not a form of remembering that refuses to solidify a slow collapse into stillness where the sacred no longer resides in structure but in air in light in moss covered silence here Friedrich finds not decay but the echo of devotion emptied out and made pure made bare and how curious that what once held walls now holds sky you once said how curious that in this reversal the divine does not descend it rises from the earth in soft defiance of permanence a theology of erosion where beauty is neither whole nor broken but endlessly returning in new forms the ruin does not mourn the past it breathes with it and perhaps this breath this quiet exhale beneath the weight of centuries is all that remains and all that was ever needed perhaps desire is nothing but this 

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at Marienbad I echo Derrida and say I am only memory I love only memory at Marienbad I remind myself of you 

here the mirrors and corridors do not know how to abolish time there is no endless loop unless I write it but my existence is finite and even if there are clues everywhere I cannot make of them a whole through which to make sense of sequences with no duration and so I wait but at Marienbad the delay is not waiting but the endless return to a place that is not a place a scene repeated with variations without origin without consequence where each step is the echo of a step already taken or never taken where the garden remains still too still the statues too silent where memory is not a thread to be unraveled but a labyrinth to get lost in a labyrinth that folds back upon itself erasing paths even as it marks them at Marienbad the figure becomes the one who speaks of a past that may not be his to someone who may not have heard him who may not even be there or anywhere the figure thus now wanders through long mirrored halls speaking not to another but into the reflection of absence into the sheen of surfaces that hold no promise no depth only light how marvelous these unchanging days at Marienbad where nothing happens and everything insists where the voice that speaks does so always as if it were the first time as if it were the last time as if it were dictating this letter repeating phrases that do not add up phrases that only circle closer and closer to a nonexistent center already erased by the labyrinth of memory this circling is all that there is my love the dance of narration without anchor the slow unpeeling of presence from presence of absence from absence and the sea too becoming such a space not of water but of endless recurrence where each wave is the repetition of another wave of a wave that never broke and the sky the pale ceiling of a room remembered erroneously or invented entirely the figure now where can it go how does it move through this space how else not forward not backward through folds of time that neither open nor close while every gesture becomes suspect while each glance becomes a cipher each word already overwritten by another by the word that will not come and in this suspension the world holds its breath in the stillness of having always already occurred in the stillness of never once having taken place yes it might all be possible the painter had doubtless opened a new path says Kleist 

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she rises slowly from the bed her feet meeting the cold barefoot as though she has never worn shoes never been burdened by the world beneath her never bound to it her body feels lighter here I could float away she thinks while from outside come the calls of people the chatter of voices some of them in languages foreign to her others in a rhythm she feels in her chest but cannot name a bicycle passes its bells reminding her of childhood our childhood hers and mine we come from a village that is not my village our roots there in this other place the other of the village of blood red poppies the forest connects them it was there where my great grandmother grew up and learned to spin wool and will to chant to enchant to tell tales of werewolves climbing to the moon in Frumoasa it means the beautiful I know she ponders on this my double she is there still in that other village myself on the other side of the river through the forest my thoughts laced to Celan we love each other like poppy and memory some months ago in Stories from the Chestnut Woods I saw the red teapot of my childhood an image of this object from a past long ago now there in this film about memories of the past warming an unremarkable January night a decaying forest on the Yugoslavian Italian border much like my own forest loneliness much like my own loneliness bewitching cinematography indeed a poetics of reverie and I remember now my love that Bachelard writes how dreams bring us back on the threshold of an anonymous childhood a life within us he says the fire of long ago in dreams the bicycle again its bells a ringing like a distant laughter like something that even though means very little is able to fill the space of the room the air around her with sound she leans toward the window her fingers brushing the edge of the curtain and for a moment the warmth of the city becomes the warmth of her skin it’s different here she thinks not soft like the evening air at home not full of quiet this is a warmth that is alive pressing against her skin a warmth that carries stories that carries history stories that are not hers but that she feels she has lived time too is different here she goes on thinking carrying with this obsession of finding things that make of this place not a home but something alive it is like the city itself stretched out in all directions constantly shifting never anchored night not a line but a long stretch of shadows that fold one into the other she steps out into the street its alleys winding like veins in the body its cobblestones uneven stones worn smooth by centuries she thinks they speak to her these streets she feels the echo of voices deep inside her bones this is a city that has been alive she thinks a city that will live long before she is gone almost feeling herself an intruder while also feeling like she has always been here in the shadows in the spaces between these buildings her body moving with a kind of fluidity no one back home would recognize in her as though the city is teaching her how to be how to exist in a new place the streets twist like a dream winding in on themselves turning into alleys much too narrow alleys and this she recognizes narrowness too dark to see where they lead yet she follows them without thinking without purpose drawn forward only by the pull of something she cannot name the city remains alive around her ancient and modern decaying and new all broken by the beauty that it carries a perfection fractured as if by her presence the buildings worn their facades cracked still something blooms wherever she looks a flower in a window a vine up a wall the faintest hint of life that refuses to become ruin

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four in the morning a conversation with the other I sit across from her silence stretching between us like a thread thin and taut barely holding she has my eyes my mouth my face but the way she carries herself the way her fingers hover just above the table as though unsure of their own touch there is something other in her something at once familiar and alien like looking at a reflection that does not quite match with how one sees and thinks about oneself and perhaps this is why I write to you my love hoping you could recognize me in her in her gaze steady but with a slight tremor beneath it perhaps in the sound of her voice that you know well in the coldness of her voice that unsettles me as if someone who has learned the pattern of my speech is sitting before me mimicking it to perfection yet empty of all the things I carry within all mechanics all logic but when she pauses when her eyes flicker to the corner of the room as if considering whether or not to continue whether or not to speak of you I see her being aware of the distance between us almost wanting needing to bridge the gap to close it to reach me her lips curl just the faintest twist and for a moment I think she will smile and wonder to myself will you recognize this but no instead she tilts her head as if she were about to lean on something on someone and again I think she must want to speak of you but no she talks of shadows and says my love I think of shadows not as absence but as the trace of presence that is always there but never fully here as if every part of me that reaches you falls just short of being you and the distance between us is not emptiness not void but full of something that cannot be touched with skin or spoken with words a shadow that swallows all things and leaves nothing behind I am not meant to touch what exists she says only as the echo of what I desire and I wonder if you feel this if you see me as I see you as something close but far away something always just on the other side of your reach but is this not the point of distance is this not the only thing that makes us real she asks myself no longer knowing whether she is addressing me or you or whether it is I who am speaking through this letter I who is asking these questions of you in your absence I who no longer sleep insomnia the dear companion of my sleepless nights like Poliphilo I say to myself recalling that Hypnerotomachia Poliphili takes place in a dream the secret psychology of the Renaissance Jung called it that which had struggled free from the grip of the symbol and I cannot help but think of the symbol of the dream itself for instance Michelangelo’s Il Sogno the bodies in the background the multiple threads of meaning one must untangle upward and over the shoulder a winged creature descends from above the central nude figure reminding me of Edvard Munch’s melancholic by the sea so yes the symbol the symbol of the dream the symbol of awakening melancholia the shifts and turns in thought and meaning perhaps this is indeed the struggle Jung speaks of the struggle to free oneself from the grip of the symbol the doubleness the paradox the doubleness of melancholia affliction and consolation and again the dream I would love to dream of time writes Bachelard

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she is born in the child the bather the dreamer the double she is born before there’s learning of the self of the world a soft trembling something that lingers in the background of every act of life in the child’s heart a yearning to be to see the world with the eyes of another with the eyes of all other themselves a version a distant twin born from the same flesh but speaking a different language something forever foreign the first encounter with the double a quiet unsettling when the child sees herself as the one seen and the one seeing as subject and object in the mirror yes both being and becoming it is this knowledge that unfolds in slow waves as she grows and learns a knowledge that never truly arrives that is never truly fulfilled for the double is never static never fixed always shifting in the space between the real and the unreal between knowing and the unknown always growing alongside her like an invisible twin pulling her toward this realm of shadows of doubles she wonders do they live together is there a world of doubles like there is a world of selves of beings even in the light even when she plays when she squints at the sun the double grows not just in imagination but in the very bones of their being the stories they tell become reflections of their own splitting selves the games they play reflections of this desire to occupy multiple spaces to be in many places to wear all the faces all the masks to stand as both the one who is loved and the one who loves the double moves through all this it moves with her through her in adulthood it takes on the shapes of old loves of lost dreams it takes the faces of past selves now unreadable faces with eyes full of longing a weave of light and darkness that stretches across the span of a lifetime in every moment lived this reflection of all selves of all others of all lovers and still not fixed not static the child’s first encounter with the double the mirror that is to be shattered again and again 

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in the forest a shadow not flesh but frost and breath amidst the trees that stand like ancient guardians draped in white the ground covered with snow with whiteness that holds the weight of silence and memory the footsteps of the wanderer a mark in the endless expanse with every step there is another an echo soft barely seen barely a presence the air is sharp and cold it cuts at the skin but she is not deterred she moves through the forest with ease her form shifting between the branches and the shadows of pines that sway with the wind this is a place where she has been before a place that she has dreamed before where the self can never be anything other than self its nature visible at every turn the forest is alive with her breath the wanderer the dreamer and in the dark corners of the soul where no light could reach the trees seem to have made a home they whisper there as the wind tugs at her clothes as silence deepens into an almost unbearable weight and only this remains the wind the trees the soul now in existence she dreams herself now in the forest of her youth she dreams herself into the other a shadow beneath the skin of sleep where no distinction remains where every being dissolves where the self is no longer singular but a reflection of something unfathomable she dreams herself between the real and the unreal she dreams a collapse like the melting of ice on a narrow river she drifts in this sleep in this dream herself mere fragment of thought suspended in the haziness of uncertainty not in herself not in the other trembling somewhere at the edge of her own dissolution she dreams she spirals deeper into herself now divided not in two but into infinite pieces scattered throughout the abyss of time she stirs like a being that is new in the world like an echo of desires to come she grows in the dark she twists she expands in this dream she does not live in the world of the waking but in the depth of consciousness no of the unconscious but the two are indistinguishable for her the one who dreams herself in the endless night forever separated from herself forever intertwined with the other forever reaching always almost touching 

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Christina Tudor-Sideri is a writer, translator, and researcher whose work unfolds at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and critical theory. She is the author of the book-length essay Under the Sign of the Labyrinth, the novels Disembodied and Schism Blue, and the collection of fragments If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces. Forthcoming are An Absence of Sea, a breathless letter to the Other; and Reliquary: On the Phenomenology of Kept Time, a monograph that undertakes an investigation of temporality, archival desire, and the phenomenological status of preservation. Her translation work, aimed at recovering underrepresented literary voices, includes texts by Max Blecher, Magda Isanos, Anna de Noailles, Mihail Sebastian, and Ilarie Voronca.