Notebook of Forgetting

Like Wittgenstein’s ladder in the that must be kicked away or Wallace Stevens’ supreme fiction, belongs to a tradition of negative poetic and philosophical projects—projects that, in their attempts to say the unsayable, are doomed to failure from the start. Even so, the attempt to say is revealing: marking out, as it does, the territory of the sayable. Searching out words to say the thing that is really at stake, but that cannot be said--cannot be said because it misses what it means in the saying, cannot be said because the words have somehow lost the ability to say, cannot be said unless it is immediately forgotten— asserts the primacy of what is beyond language in the only way writing can: through the language which fails to reach it.