'The page is a touching'

The touch screen - the screen where I come in contact with the outside runs deep. The depth beyond the touch far exceeds an imagination of what an infinity can be. To imagine an infinite world all within your touch. Possibilities that exist only through the mind and implode silently. With each swipe, touch, tap and pinch.

‘The page is a touching, of my hand while it writes and your hands while they hold the book. This touch is infinitely indirect, deferred, but it continues as a slight, resistant, fine texture, the infinitesimal dust of a contact everywhere interrupted and pursued. In the end, here and now, your own gaze touches the same traces of characters as mine and you read me and I write you.

If I write I create sense-effects. I displace myself from bodies. Exscription passes through writing and so we have to write from a place, a body that we neither have nor are.’ 

- Jean Luc Nancy, Corpus

pencil outline of a detail from an Ukiyo-e woodblock print 

Dancing is writing, writing in space, making space within the opaque, hollowing it out so the inside and outside are no longer apart. The inside-outing of an intestinal desire. Akka Mahadevi wraps herself in silk rays from the sun, Krishna opens his mouth to show his mother an entire cosmos. The eye is the crack whose infinite darkness saves brightness from staining - a suction pump that deletes and erases all temporary files from Random Access Memories.

A sincere body, acting behaving, dancing and imitating everyday touches sincerely the ground it walks, tumbles and crawls upon. Writing about the dead owl outside our house and its passing makes the owl die two times over. Thriving on the ink and paper or the incandescent glow of the laptop screen and its flickering letters, the white feathers reappear on the grey belly of the owl, electrocuted by the electric pole by the street outside our house.  

A body is perhaps made by its documentary. It lives, it dies, it breathes when it has been written in the world of others. A lone human on the planet might as well be a plant or an insect or the wind?

‘But it was in vain that I lingered beside the hawthorns – breathing in their invisible and unchanging odour, trying to fix it in my mind, losing it, recapturing it, absorbing myself in the rhythm which disposed the flowers here and there with a youthful light-heartedness , and at intervals as unexpected as certain intervals in music – they went on offering the same charm in inexhaustible profusion but without letting me delve any more deeply, like those melodies which one can play a hundred times in succession without coming any nearer to their secret.

I turned away from them for a moment so as to be able to return to them afresh.’ 

- Proust, Swann's Way , In Search of Lost Time