crisis

 from ana patova crosses a bridge by renee gladman

"as a country
this was our crisis: getting other people
to see what we were seeing. and it
wasn't as if there was this multitude of
idylls we simply couldn't share but, rather,
for the most part, there was only one
idyll and for everyone else a void. the
people on the train took my hallucination
as a sign of their own suffering. you were
better if you could hold a picture in your
head, a scene or many scenes. but, i
wasn't trying to be better. i was trying
to breathe and not hear what people
were saying about this day in their life
of the crisis. people suffered. they woke
in a morning, before the sun rose. you
didn't want to know. it was to be their secret, but
all day they leaked their words, and i
leaked my words. in the silence following
my vision i couldn't help but say
'mostlip' as people gathered around me.
then said 'gap,' then said 'triumph.'
your words, your words, someone
admonished me. 'goodnight,' i
completed the list. people cared for me
in long minutes of awkwardness in which
i swooned and held my eyes closed in
shame."

"you began to take on other
people's sentiments, because of the weight
and translucence of the scroll, because
the threads of the paper did not take well
to ink, because ink was all there was.
'jandovirr is changing,' i wrote into
the scroll one day. 'it has changed.' but,
when i noticed these words appearing
all over the scroll, sometimes saying
jandovirr, sometimes mohaly or cit
sahaly or names from other parts of the
city but all the same vague observation-
changing - when i saw this i began to write
in greater detail: 'the manhole cover had
been replaced; kiva's was packed with
people, they seemed like foreigners. a
couple stood on the corner waiting for a
light that was inoperable, they waited,'
and wrote out tracks of details of my
seeing, until i started to see these
particulars repeating along the scroll.
you worried that the crisis was following
you and, because of how closely it
mirrored your thinking, that you were
the crisis."

"'to think of architecture is to do what,
ana patova?' she asked me when the
reports came out that our population had
been decimated by three years of
bewilderment and a feeling that one had
been ghosted, the total number of
inhabitants now only an eighth of what
it had been. 'why have we remained?'
you wondered when you sat emptily.
the crisis made you watch it and so did
architecture, which you did until it
devastated you, then beyond that point
(you still looking at it).my thinking of
architecture resulted from my thinking
of the line, how the line made narrative
regardless of whatever else it was making,
and narrative presented enclosures for
your questions about living, and living,
for the most part, required space, which
turned out to be a definite field of study.
but, in order to enjoy architecture i
realized i needed people, so i didn't
know what to do when they began to flee.
i wrote a book in which i explained all of
this; it was one hundred and eighty-three
pages and said 'crisis,' 'crisis' in every
chapter and used drawings to illustrate
the 'empty feeling,' which i believed to
be the cause for everyone's leaving. not
everyone could move about a city as if she
were traversing a remote highland, as if
she were the last pedestrian in the world.
not everyone could say 'farewell' all the
time with her exhausted body, clambering
over some pole."

"it was the city,
but was unreachable, was violent, without
victims and without perpetrators, and
violent, though there were no crimes."

"what i slept in was created by
my mind; it was a question of void space,
my sleeping. it began as empty, black
space then was transformed by light, by
ribboning, by the secreted presence of
another. another person touched my
sleep and shapes formed. i knew who
she was; i called her name. she could
not come in body. so there was this
sleeping geometric holding feeling, and
there was outside architecture."

"we had been walking for hours,
looking for a happening, a boundary
event that would put an end to the crisis,
not an extraordinary occurrence - some
magical intervention - but a small act out
of a cabinet of everyday acts that we'd
witnessed numerous times and never
noticed and never saw the way through.
we thought it would be a speech act, so
began to look for instances where we
might chance upon bodies in unconscious
speech: we looked through people's
windows. but windows looked into houses
whose structures were no longer reliable.
it had become impossible to say that you
were contained, to say 'hello, the house,'
as you once had. the object world, we
noted, was drawn on by shadows."

"meanwhile, the eye witnesses the story
of what we were when we happened,
when the last person left and the first
person returned as if the same moment,
as if the inhale began in the exhale, that
first person leaving, who belonged to all
of us, and what we became in his
leaving: our reaching for our cups. we
were holding space and making space
through stillness, looking for structures
to reflect what we were seeing, which
was nothing. i wrote about buildings,
and for the first part of the crisis this
kept me occupied. i was holed up in my
home. i slept on the books i wrote, which
i'd glued between boards and given
unassuming titles like slow and tired, but
these books were my life's work; i knew
once i'd finished them i would never
write again; rather i would not need to
write or live or sleep, it felt like. when i
changed my mind about this, when i
changed my mind - but, it was me and it
was l. and it was z. and b., and we were
all high on coffee, and sometimes pills,
waiting for some storm to come, some
document from abroad."

"the notion of thinness, i thought, as
the two of them sat on either side of an
important threshold that neither seemed
capable of seeing for the six hundredth
time in their history, was this sitting here
between them and who i was supposed
to be now in this new emergency, when
ana patova and luswage amini couldn't
cross this bridge, again. it wasn't so much
a line between us as a bend in time, a fold
where one had to walk through fire, or
believe this to be the case. luswage
amini believed she could not get across
to ana patova as long as ana patova
remained in ravicka. 'luswage amini
is in france' became the material of
that thinness. i put my arms through
them, both of them at the same time: i
put my left, i put my right. i waved my
arm about inside myself and tried to look
down and peer at it, to see it through the
thin window of my body. my arm was in
her chest when amini stood up and leaned
over and grabbed ana patova's ear and
whispered something, that i should have
heard since my arm was in ana as well as
in luswage, and in me. i didn't hear what
she said so ana patova didn't hear, or i
couldn't feel through the book i was
writing that she'd heard."

"spaces moaned. they were of an order
that had nothing to do with what we
felt when we were in them; they had
become impossible to write about,
impossible to enter, impossible to leave.
you wanted to say 'space, space' to
create an index of where you went and
what happened to you, you wanted to
say 'cafe,' you wanted to say 'alleyway,'
you wanted to say 'bedroom.' 'train,'
was a place you needed, 'museum,'
'cemetery.' you gave names so that
you could return to the walls between
experience; you stamped time onto
things so that you could recognize the
walls. spaces moaned; they did not
want your walls. the names i gave
most often did not fit. i walked 'outside'
into a 'closet' that was supposed to be
a 'yard,' because the light of 'day'
had come up and 'people' were waiting
for me and 'books' wanted to pass
through themselves and other books,
and 'language' needed to be made.
i woke and stretched my body and
felt pain in my hands. 'today' was
a broken index. but, still, you felt the
presence of 'world' there inside the
room (and outside the room). it couldn't
be avoided and asked to be opened and
was open all the time. but what you did
with where your body went, how you
wrapped words around it, calling it
something that might be useful to others,
who also did not know space, which was
everyone, was of an order inconsequential
to the space you inhabited."

the moment of absorption

quotes from event factory by renee gladman

"something had not been right there for a long time now, so the situation must be escalating. but why was it affecting him physically? 'what do you need,' i asked him. i tried to register my own health. the signals from my body were scattered and despondent. i decided to ignore its information entirely. there were too many 'feelings' sounding off in too many parts for me to believe any of them real. first, i was gripping my ankle and then i was grabbing at my sides, and just as i got comfortable attending to these areas, a pain erupted in my head, and my pelvis felt as though it had been ripped in two. ulchi, on the other hand, had just one symptom: he could not breathe."

"architecture again. it always comes to that. i can never get inside it; the singing structure eludes me. all my life, i swear that this has been true: i look at a shape, then look out into the world for the contents to fill it, but the thing i bring back does not fit - it more than not-fits, it destroys the shape altogether. as though putting my hands on things causes their distinctions to blur, as though i am not right to touch."

"i woke up in the green dawn and accepted the converse of my last spoken words. back there on the the grass, some place between pain and pleasure, my mind turned over the question of abandonment. it inserted an illusion, where reality would have destroyed me. the body deserted. standing now i recalled that voice, which at the time seemed as far away as a dream, saying, 'look at what i am writing.' was that she?"

"nothing had happened since dar left. it seemed that nothing ever would. but you say that, then you look around, and everything has changed. the mile i had counted was actually three. and i was already in a conversation."

"suddenly, as i turned the corner, a new idea struck me: in any city, where there is a crisis, one always encounters those who deny the occurrence of that very crisis, and eventually one finds out about the activists, but there is also a group that is equally as persuasive as the two above, just not interviewed as much - this group called 'the artists.'"

"i passed her. it did not feel good. i was stunned. i let a day go by. i could not tell if seeing her really happened. i was moody. i had not eaten. i found a comfortable place and began to read. the book held me; i leaned against it. i was waiting to be absorbed. i wanted to feel its mouth on me, its teeth break the surface of my skin - to witness myself growing smaller, dividing, falling through the tunnel of the book, fully inside it, until i vanished from here and existed there only -"

"so far, what i had gathered in this reading of matlatli doc was the difficulty of matching the moment of absorption (understanding) to the actual event that allowed for it. also, i found that amini was fond of the ravic phrase indicating 'it's not this gate but the one behind you' - often translated as 'your mistake and your other's mistake' - to talk about chamber music. i had forgotten how much waiting had to do with music."

"to move through this city was the only way to depart from it, which is what i had been doing all along. while arrival, if ever achieved, is one of the most minimalist of experiences, departure is long, luxuriating torture. but the name of my torturer was never know; i did not think i had uttered it. i did not think i had ever faced that person."

you stared.

quotes from ana patova crosses a bridge by renee gladman

"the crisis took words out of my books and
strung them together, put them in
envelopes, and mailed them to my
friends, appalling them with obscenities
and abstraction. the crisis made me
give up architecture, drawing up plans
for building, and sat me roughly in
this chair from which i did not leave
for years. it was ten years, the despair,
and it was five days, and it was your
childhood, and the time it took to cross
a bridge; it was the love you could not
have of the woman who called your name;
it was while you were farming, while you
built a circular home. the crisis tied you
to a chair and said, 'write!' then took
your sentences as they landed. i farmed
from my window."

"we were making chaos with our goodbye notes,
and it wasn't as though leaving wasn't
happening but that it just wasn't ourselves
who were doing it. no one could name names.
we all knew that hausen wanted to go, and
when he finally vanished, many of us felt
relief. we missed him, though we didn't
know him (we knew his confinement), but
we celebrated his departure as a threshold
crossing. 'hausen finally made it,' we'd say
and clink our glasses. so, we knew that leaving
was possible and that in many corners of
our neighborhoods people were preparing
to depart, and did depart. but, we couldn't
call out to them, even when the time came
and the deserter was someone we loved or
someone with whom we worked and drank.
our mouths would empty, for a long time,
would be dry, and when saliva came back
to us, it was only to ourselves that we could
point. 'i'm leaving,' i would misspeak
without knowing. 'i've left too,' would say
luswage."

"i wrote this book in a circular home on a hill, overlooking
the city, which roams while we are sleeping; i wrote it in
a cafe with my friends; i wrote it as i looked for hidden
streets, while sitting in desolate and lush spaces. i wanted
to say language leaves a trace, makes a simultaneous trail,
of us and of the crisis. my walking leaves a trace, also my
saying i have walked. and, this is important, because,
though these marks do not render precisely the picture of
our crisis, they do show where there are still people. the
day fills up with monuments, and the book attempts to
erect a fence around them. the book wishes to end a crisis
by the sheer fact of existing. but, rather than a history, the
book becomes an index. it shuffles our bewilderment. it
does not tell our story. it cannot do that. nevertheless, it
opens toward you."

"for one second, i spoke 'sentence,'
which confused her, since all this time
i'd been saying 'paragraphs.'it was a
moment of our mouths missing one
another. her mouth was emitting sound.
she seemed to be calling my name,
breathing heavily, she seemed to put her
words inside me. 'writing my frightening
paragraphs,' i said, involuntarily. 'your
paragraphs grow on the walls of your
books.' we were inside an argument. i
resisted my torso toward the ceiling. i let
my hamstrings rise, something caught in
my hip. it was an interruption. i was
correcting her about my books: they did
not have walls, they had holes dug deep
in the earth. 'it's frightening,' she blew
in my face."

"he was a man
who swam at night in empty buildings.
the man went home to someone who
did not seem quite like a woman, but who
also was not identified as a 'man.' the
man coming home lay on top of this
person and swam and told a story, which
was a confession, and the body gasped,
but we did not know if the man's story
was causing this gasping or whether the
cause was his writhing. the reader couldn't
hear the story, but hausen had the language
around the story crack and drop heat on us.
and the body writhed on top of the other
body and whispered to it about something
done and undone in the city, something
sitting under water, something terrible."

"the west was not available to me. my
country was in a state of unspeakable
emergency. you could lift your eyebrows
when someone said so-and-so had left, but
you couldn't put shoulders to it. you
couldn't bend and show how your heart
hurt. you couldn't answer questions from
finland. but finland called and i said
something non-committal to keep finland
around, because it felt good that someone
was looking in. i had no need to curtain
the space in which i wrote, in which i
worried. in fact, if i weren't able to look
up from time to time to catch a neighbor
steal a glance through my windows, i
would not be able to progress in my
work. i waited for interruptions. i waited
for the feeling of eyes on me. finland felt
that i should reconsider. i felt simply that
i should be seen."

"i met luswage in an alley
when the 'moments' began, and would
stand there and would stare at her. we
would stand close and would stare at one
another until our eyes hurt, until the skin
beneath our eyes tremored and beyond
that point. luswage amini stood next to
me. nothing in the world could deter
this, no storm, no regulator. hausen had
gone, relations were strained. we feared
the worse, which were the moments that
tore you away from the city. for love,
you met in alleys, you bowed and
gathered in your hands someone's hair,
you hid when you heard voices, and you
stared. you stared. and at the end of it
sheets of paper were exchanged."

inswept

quotes from event factory by renee gladman

"every time he changed my plate, he spoke softly, 'i am miho. i will be your server.' but i did not think i had come to ravicka to be served. i wanted to protest, but thought that would require knowing why i had come, which i had not yet discovered."

"leaving that house and retracing my steps back to the hotel proved difficult. these people appeared dismayed to see me go, perhaps even insulted, which surprised me, considering what had just taken place between us. nevertheless, i lost time recalling the 'turns' i needed to perform my apology. i was in a hurry - i did not want to travel in the dark, when the city was still so foreign to me. but rushing made me clumsy. we were all frustrated. i went through pareis several times, but always tripped up on the same move and had to start over again. you cannot skip ahead, or you'll be saying something entirely different. i wanted to say, 'when you are a visitor to a place, especially one such as ravicka, it is difficult to remain stationary. the landmarks call out.' but i could not get my body to say 'landmark' versus the 'shipyard' it kept performing."

"after a while, so much time of non-interaction had passed between us that she was a stranger again. i leaned away from her towards the aisle. felt awkward. i looked out the window across from me. i could not say that the city was going by. i believed that it had not yet become a city."

"i had never been to old ravicka: i was told its architecture gave one a medieval feeling. i did not have nostalgia for that particular moment in human history; it was the idea of being inswept in time (as held by place) that possessed me. i wanted to experience the muscularity of the present diminishing in me as it was replaced by a past i never could have known myself."

"crossing into the old city took the better part of the day when you were as hungry as we were, which was not a nutritional hunger but rather something deeply emotional. the iron of the bridge becoming stone, becoming ancient and rough as we moved along it, without having altered our course, but the world around us changing. 'eat before you leave,' was more like 'forget where you have been,' because it was impossible to hold this crossing in your mind. the contemporary city did not align with this old one, which, in its preserved state, made a mess of our eyes."

"'who are you?' she responded. 'do you need to come up?'
do i need, i thought.
'yes. i think that's right,' i said."

"despite (or due to) our attachment to the esaleyons, we were not allowed to remain with them. early one morning, they walked us out of the depths into old ravicka. we were expelled because of the intensity of my dreams. my body wore the signs. each forearm was deeply imprinted by the fingers of the opposite hand, though this was at so odd an angle i had to wonder if it really was i who had made these impressions. but my fingertips were hot when i pointed this out to them, which weakened my position. they said they woke me afraid that i was being too insistent with this text, these prints on my arms, and they needed to know what i wanted. was i a spy? did i have a message? i told them at best i was a linguist and that the dream was about architecture. but they stared at me, still waiting. i dug deep within myself for words that might satisfy them. 'do i have something?' i asked dar in her language. she said, 'well, tell them why you came here.' which was perhaps more what she wanted to know. i thought about the gaps and breaths and my failure to record them. i said, 'at some point i knew we'd have to leave here.' and they breathed and beat back, 'the violence of your premise.' leaving no room for response."

"on the morning of simon's return, zaoter was helping me behind the counter. an elderly couple, attracted by the columns out front, had wandered in to inquire about the hotel's vacancies. they spoke the thick accent one finds in the ravickian hillsides. zaoter could not understand a thing they said, but persisted in pretending that he did. i tried to intervene, understanding their needs, and kept saying to him, 'halabiti astanga lo,' which means, 'allow me.' i even accompanied this offer with a hand gesture, soft against his shoulder. he responded, in my native tongue, from the corner of his mouth, the approximate of 'let me live.' i saw it then: zaoter was in over his head. the picture took its final form: without simon, there was no center. there was no hotel. even though i stood there and performed simon brilliantly, without him, it was a different place. it was a dormitory, a train station, just as he had said. realizing this, i knew the rest instantly. i left zaoter and the exasperated couple to find their own way, and ran up to my room. after securing the lock, pulling the shade, and turning on the desk lamp, i removed a tablet and pen from my travel bag. i lay a sheet of paper across the desk and wrote the following words in blue ink, in a large script:

DEAREST SIMON,
WE NEED YOU. ALL SYSTEMS HAVE COLLAPSED. PEOPLE AND MONEY ARE ONE. THE CORRIDORS LEAD TO UNMARKED DOORS THAT WILL NOT OPEN. I HAVE ADMITTED THIRTEEN NEW GUESTS AND SAID GOODBYE TO SIX. BUT WITH NO CORE, WE ARE ACTING WITHOUT MUSIC. YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE WHO TRULY LIVES HERE. PLEASE RETURN."

0

quotes from the ravickians by renee gladman

"i want to raze one city block of my mind, to open up the entire avenue for what is to come. for this purpose, i will relinquish the area i have dedicated to the study of maths, and, rather than find some cranny for the displaced information, i will let it go. yes, for about two hours - after this procedure but before i enter the performance hall - i will have an entirely empty corridor in my mind. empty. beautifully empty. of course, the danger is with the inevitable desire for more emptiness, which makes one attack other parts of one's mind. the compulsion is not unlike what follows the moment where you are conscious of the entire surface of your skin and there is one small patch over which someone has run her tongue and, above that spot, blown a bit of air. the cool of it. how you want to extend the feeling, so turn to other neighborhoods within you or beg the lover to move on with her tongue. how impossible it is, though, to make any more feeling than you already have. you run the risk of going utterly numb."

"why when i say dahar do you say 'yellow'? i know that word. the air here is not yellow. it is dahar (yellow). if you are engaged in a translation and discover that a quality you need to convey does not exist in your language, the language into which you are moving, do not pick the next best thing. sometimes you will have to put a '0' there; this will indicate a hole.

the ravickians know about this. if you do not acknowledge the ignorance you bear, then the places where you have facility in speaking will seem crowded and dull. this is not new: you need nothing to see something, which is the theory behind white space.

nevertheless, the day is beautiful for one who is returning to her intimates. i walked these same streets almost a week ago, but with my old mentality - 'without an actual boundary to cross, i will never reach you.' i did not arrive anywhere. i passed places that i thought could have been for me; i walked up to their doors, but never entered them. at the market i thought, 'this is a logical place to be.' but after visiting a few stalls, still empty-handed, i decided that i was not there. i was not at the bank to withdraw money for bills. i did not buy a hammock for my garden. jili harass did not meet me at cafe balva for an interview. the opening of the sisi sondergaard exhibit at fog gallery did not occur for me. nothing has happened for weeks, though i struggle to prove this. people will never believe you are 'without events.' and that is why decay is slow, and why it is not devastation."

"you cannot enter a place without proving to the occupants that you have a body. not just to display the limbs and skin you carry around with you, but to prove you are in a dialogue with them."

"when there is so little left you do not give it all to one; you fight to keep that thing in the mainstream. what could be worth that kind of sacrifice, literally ridding your house of its first step?"

"little has been said about ravicka's future, in whose hands it rests. if the adage is correct, then it should be with our young. but what allows one to grow old is stability and recognition. we have not had those things."

"i reach out with my mind to grab the misrepresentation before it penetrates him and remember how the outside confuses me lately. events do not unfold, as they should - the simplest, most benign gestures often ending in sadness. even when you are discussing the health benefits of tamarind you look up and find tears in the other's eyes, that person no less confused than you."

"the blinding, pent-up of trying to get a message to the next place, what we will become bas devrojalijin (after the rain). of moving so quickly from where we are that the words are erased by force of trying. stopping and changing the mode of transportation is the only way to convey the message, looking beyond matter to do so. . . i have a poem:

i was once
i was once in a movie
                                                  a great
                                                  house
isolated
by fire

                the heat
a voice of
leaving

                called out

but did not speak
   
                             the space
behind the voice

                  years before
                             i saw the imprint

cousins, when you are writing it is always the other place that haunts you. the place you just were. for most of my life i have regretted the decisions that saved me. yes, these last-minute departures have made me safer in the world, but my days pass as if i am missing something. the gossips say it's impossible to hear happy stories is ravicka. in belgium, they're saying this.

but receiving - whether it is by listening or reading - is a matter of waiting. we know this.

i have made a habit of staying in one place and looking outward, through screens and other people's books. i have tried to be ready."

"that it is there        the archive

               and fandwej        the real

         smolder inconsequently
for now
               it's now
               that worries him"

"          against
a rush of water

something broke

was going
too fast

            and nothing
            did appear
            that was not
            annihilated
            by the present

still the pails
going after it"

"fataki is not alone in his fever; i don't mean to isolate him. we are all doing our things more erratically, easy to attribute this to the despair. but why surrender the idea of permanence? must we lose faith in structure. . ."

 "time falls on it
and us                     differently

            we cannot stand
            the mess it makes

                                ignoring the safety
            between people

how it became its opposite"

"          standing -- is it that i'm
                   standing

is it you
who are next to me

            in front of me

this food line
for individuals

            where are we going
            did i come with you

so the bell rang
and we
            congregated here

with our notebook-pails
reaching

we were moving
you said
we were
moving

the steps
represented years

our people
fell off
entangled streets
a hand
reached out"

"-thirsty
-thirsty
-hunger and thirst
-my shoes conforming around my feet
-lefits' is through the next corridor
-one should lean on another's shoulder
-to show we have been brave, amini?
-to emphasize the extravagance of our walk"

"-my thanks to the poet of architecture
-but you are trying to say
-that i want to be here more
-you and ana patova, except her ambivalence
-the place she has gone?
-away with her thoughts
-we miss her already"

"-i am always concerned for my city
-yes, if you would allow me, you walk hesistantly toward it
-you would like me to be a guerrilla, sirin cucek?
-of sorts, luswage amini. if anyone can preserve these walls it is you
-but who is our enemy?
-that which is on the other side of our walls
-is not that us?
-we are pushing against a counter force
-at least, that is what we believe we are doing. can we trace this story to its beginning? to the moment of inheritance?"

bridges

all quotes from the ravickians by renee gladman

"her entrance into my life came at a crossing, that of the great bridge connecting cit mohaly to cit sahaly. i no longer remember from which direction each of us was walking; it is equally possible to have been either - one was always moving back and forth between these enclaves. . . i was writing my first novel at the time and would have wanted to occupy both places simultaneously. so, it is more likely that i was not actually crossing the bridge, but standing directly in its center. in any case, it was not the beauty of the person approaching me that caught my attention; rather it was the title of the book in her hand, or to be precise, its typography. it seemed to go with whatever i had been thinking, because as she passed me, some instinct took over the body: before i could stop myself i had reached out and grabbed the book from her hand.

i had been sitting here trying to recall, with no luck, who spoke to whom first. i also find nothing that explains how we made our way to the railing of the bridge, nor what we did for most of that hour we spent together. i had given her back the book. that is clear. i see her holding it. but, in that memory, there is also the sense that something had opened between us. someone had said the right thing and propelled us into this conversation. words come back to me now - 'the elongated later,' 'your rare insides' - though these words had to have occurred in a different arrangement to have made sense. approaching also is the reflexive body, the torso sweeping down and the slender arm reaching for the other's opposite side."

"no matter how clear these words are to you, they were not written for my comprehension. ana patova's intentions have never quite reached me. her words flow in a linear, progressive fashion; however, always, it seems, toward erasure. the closer i get to the end of a sentence, the less certain i am of its beginning. while this quality is potentially interesting for creative or theoretic work, it is obstructive to everyday communication. we have thirty years of this."

"meeting a person on a bridge and standing there with her, not progressing to either end, but staying put or at most drifting conscientiously over to the side, imprints upon you the sense that you are hovering with the person. i harbor little expectation that ana patova and i will ever complete our conversations."

"in choosing the term 'installation' instead of the more familiar 'chapter' to section her book, ana patova had to have contemplated destruction. well for a long time, as a thing is being made, you cannot tell whether it is growing or dying. it is possible to confuse one for the other in this life."

"thirty years ago, ana patova and i thought we could pass our lives on this bridge, held in this conversation. then, it seemed that the grip that fixed us there was beginning to loosen and something had to change. perhaps, to put a table and drinks between us. but in which place? there were reasons for choosing either: cit sahaly because it was gorgeous and ancient and from it we could watch the spectacle at the other end of the bridge, or cit mohaly because it was the spectacle. these are my divisions, in retrospect. i cannot say as clearly what i understood then. ana patova had an extraordinary face - this is one thing. she was a thinker; we had that book in common. she was not exactly ravickian. these pieces i have extracted from my soft memory. there are many more. did i dream people smiling at us? did she grab my hand?

it must have been cit sahaly that we chose. this would have provided the better adventure, since neither of us lived there, and perhaps it was felt that we needed to move away from what was familiar. but you look back and realize how strange it is to make a decision, because you know that choosing to do one thing makes it impossible to do something else. you do the thing you chose but always there is this ghost of what would have happened had you. . . that a walk toward home would have implanted the combining shape of two in your bed, or that the mohalai light would have made living apart inconceivable - unfortunately, there were no indications that the actions to which you did commit would have necessitated the opposite.

i have flattened this point with my urgency. . .

it is important that i do not just stand here."

"these remaining poems are all i have regarding our great bridges. i spent the morning worrying if i end here, right at this moment, would i leave you with enough? i don't like the idea of your emptiness. that's why we have ventured out in our sleeping city, right? it is not possible to forget the bridges. yet, daily, we insulate against the prospect. stone doesn't vanish, though: it explodes. and we are not doing that here."

"night in those
books that lay

          the city
          of the center
                    in the crumble
          structure

that voice
calling out

          'names
          that do
          not know
          other names'

                    from the center
          of that thinking
deserted
          city
                    your book"

"-as the mind gives forth speech - schleser called it 'bandergewilden' (longing to be) - bridges are created. but they aren't beautiful; they are more like walkways. they are beautiful, but not treated as such. these bridges are the little words, the connectors, the articles, as they are called. prepositions. english users pronounce the relations between things instead of performing them as we would. in translation, i am stuck between oratory and dance."

"-what is so amazing?
-that it is still today
-has it been overlong?
-i would not have believed it possible. very much happened to me. it feels strange to ask, but if no one knows you how can you separate days?
-and amini, you feel you have not been known?
-not entirely this year
          'my ashen rooms'
-who said that?
-levric, when he was younger
-did he mean his lungs?
-i think it was for loda, his first wife
-the head cartographer?
-of so many years ago
-and you say these words now?
-the building i am always seeing through this window
-what would have happened were i not with you all this night?
-most things
-ana patrova, you have an ear this way?
-it is difficult to pretend women are not speaking
-'and do we eat with our hands'
-i have not heard that saying in years
-stays with me
-but it is too dark to see it now
-a bridge of things
-what do you want to see?
. . .
-all this night i have had intense horizontal energy
-and this table is on the verge of dissolve
-and we are
-and this is"

"-ana patova, you shocked me by meeting someone
-fifteen years ago
-then you stopped coming to the bridge
-it was moved
-and that person took your life
-it was mohaly that ravaged me
-never. i met someone today, but i could not keep her
-her name?
-that neither
-how can you be sure, then?
-sure of what?
-that anyone was there
-this time i was fortunate. she touched me
-unlike us, you're thinking
-we did not touch and your disappearance undid our meeting
-i was thinking
-of architecture, i know. but as a result i lost everything
-luswage amini, you are the great ravickian novelist. is that not enough?
-i am not complaining, ana patova. i want to say something, yet all i have are your words
-from so many years ago?
-'it is impossible on this bridge alone'
-the 'most', i think it was
-we have been at this thirty years
-the ravickian night is long, ana patova, it will not end
-
-that day the water looked like skin
-how luswage? don't change it
-i am not
-then how?
-in that distance, the rippling made layers and textured the surface somehow, a leather effect
-but why didn't you ever say this?
-i am saying it now
-after so long?
-it was only yesterday"

"and also sirin cucek you have transformed us with your translations. you have given us the first sketches of a new bridge, a transcendental shape, a way to re-conceive motion. you will tell me it is the poet of architecture who has done this. yes, in part. but it is not just the words of 'the exactitude and the ocean beside it'; it is also the figuring of that line through a language that has not relations to the exact, that has barely known water, it is the combination of these forces that has 'the neighbor pouring over my mouth.'

your mouth, sirindeska, looks right now as if it has been open for years, as if all it knows is open. i want to write that"

"-this bridge
-it is not possible that we are here again
-in thirty years we have stood at this mouth
-or the other mouth
-so many times that it's pointless to announce it
-we say goodbye again. i have overgrown this exchange
-yet you are the reason we must repeat it
-i?
-if you could enter the city with me
-to inhabit together?
-we have thirty years of this
-but you are city, already built
-no, awaiting structure
-the person i met did not know me
-to suggest otherwise is
-most
-after all this we are still alone
-they say even of ravicka
-still, we fill this night with reported sirens
-i wonder who will hear them
-zaoter will be first
-if he does not give in to sleep, some shadowed steps
-he will not go there before the sun is up
-where will he go, then?
-we are all walking this line and may or may not integrate
-as with the traffic confusion of three years ago; you were stuck in the middle of it. i could only half-see; tomas bello said he could only a quarter move. what happens after full exposure? have you become more a person?
-not yet, ana patova. and you. . . are you whole?
-no. i have completed only present tense
-the sky is grayer in that direction
-i do not see it
-so, the event begins
-for some of us
-sirin cucek's mother is a pianist. did you hear that?
-clearly
-imagine it
-i have been trying
-and the black streak there. . . do you see it
-that i have seen; it has been there since early night. before sofia even, when we were still vonzy
-bridge
-the self-same
-most. . . passageway
-that is, if you want the other side
-and the mist is new
-mist?
-let's cross now
-aren't we waiting? sometimes one just wants to hold here
-never to move, never to see
-i am working, luswage amini
-as am i
-city matter?
-night's
-you are back to the busses
-but someone else's route
-they are right then. . . you have found a lover
-no, i have waited
-we have to cross it
-this is true. again we will part
-the bifurcated bridge
-we will remain
-and regroup on the other side
-where the books meet
-and leaning structures"

"'many languages of this region share the same word for bridge. that word is most.' -ayse buldu"