In the beginning came the words. But the words were not words. What seemed at first like an endless flow of words was in reality debris being sporadically pushed out of the nothing (and, as it happened, the white field lay beneath the words glaring at me). I was, then, the white field, indenting in my flesh ciphers in the manner of poems as if written by a novice attempting the task with no prior knowledge of languages. I was the white field; my mind was a white field. (I was nowhere.)
These words serve as an introduction to the poems. The poems are photographed below. Essentially, this is a book that will never leave me; I cause myself to cease in this introduction. And this happens to be the introduction.
I say to myself that letting them publish the work of Borges was a gross mistake. Borges is the literature of the archive, a literature made of notes written on scraps of paper intentionally left to collect dust inside metal cabinets, a literature lost in itself and hence unnameable. The day they barged into his apartment and made all his writings public was the day the archive was torn out of its musty chambers. (The impenetrable archive was published and the world stammered every time it attempted to cite the cipher.) Nowadays, we go about purchasing small sections extracted from those imaginary hollows; then, in the privacy of our homes, we try to tease out from those passages some phantom name – and Borges is the only name we encounter, a phantasmagoric apparition reified as a scribble on some page lying therein. Borges is the archive.
The poems appear below – photographed; they desist from being present in the here and now. Photographed, they are announced to the public straight off as archive material. (It must be said, though, that these poems know only too well that they actually lie somewhere printed on paper.)
As more debris floats to the surface, I might add more works to this digital book. But, surely, I ought to cease here.