http://www.alligatorzine.be/pages/101/zine113.html

In the poem “Ode or Nearly There” from h.j.r. a line wrote itself: [To] “caravan / atoms into lines of flight.” The oddness of that line was brought home — wherever that may be, if ever caravans do get there, which is neither here nor there — when my French translator queried it. Though French certainly isn’t home either, as no language is, despite our desire to make it so. Language, even after the long trek through the dictionaries, remains the stranger, the other, we want to engage — and which always and irremediably so remains the outside.

Our outside we are building a future home in which we will never inhabit. We can only inhabit that which will disappear with us, that which does not survive us, i.e. ourselves. We are our home, this infinitesimal second — die Sekunde, diese Kunde (Werner Hamacher thus reads a line from Celan) — of presence to ourselves we imagine in retrospect to have been us present to ourselves when we / it is already too late, gone, a cadaver as we move into a here that, even before we can dot the I of our quasi-presence, has become a there.

Pierre Joris | from “St/range: An Uncertain Range” (1999), A Nomad Poetics: Essays, 2003

(via ahuntersheart)

(Source: books.google.com)