FragLit

an online magazine of fragmentary writing

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Meditations on Love

Spring 2008 :: Archived Issue

2008 :: Issue 2/Spring :: Meditations on Love

Prelude: Making Strange

Billetdoux
to the Dead
Eating Sepia
Click to open in your mp4 player.

Are the dead fragments of the living, or the living fragments of the dead?

Tradition: The adventitious handing down of fragments.

How would the living be able to communicate with the dead or the dead with the living if they did not hold something in common? (The voluble traffic in fragments between the living and the dead.)

There are fragments of the dead that continue to speak long after the dead have fallen silent.

Can you hear the voices of the dead haunting the silences between words?

All the fragments the dead have given shall one day be returned.

How could the living speak without the fluttering tongues of the dead?

The unceasing flow of fragments from the mouths of the dead. (Whenever I open my mouth to speak, their tottering Babels fall in.)

What is memory? Why do some fragments survive?

Because there is death, there are fragments. Because there is life, there is a gathering of fragments.

Can the living live without stealing from the dead?

One advantage of the dead … they are beyond believing.

Can we ever repay our debts to the dead? (Eternal installment plan.)

The dead have given up stories … this rare wisdom few of the living will attain.

Why do the passions of the dead outlive, by far, their actions?

In the beginning was the dead, in the living, the end.

The dead have no choice but to entrust themselves to fragments. Isn’t this also true for the living?

Death is a house of fragments.

Who is death to me if I am no-one?

Dispatch
to a Stranger
Breathing
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… you don’t know me … but I love you … so I am sending you these fragments … flickering signs of my adoration … why do I only fall in love? … with strangers … maybe true love is only possible … between strangers … the first kiss … always a kiss between strangers … also the last kiss … there are so many of you … to fall in love with … wave upon wave … you wash over me … love multiplies us … fragments of me … fragments of you … love draws a circle … round these fragments … calls it home … what I love about you is … the mystery … you give me fragments … and I do not know … where did these fragments come from? … where are they going? … will they take me there? … how can you embrace the strangeness in yourself … if you cannot embrace? … the strangeness in the other … the writer loves the stranger … because he loves fragments … or does he love fragments because he loves … the stranger? … is there anything stranger than the fragment? … is there anything more lovable? … than the stranger? … the writer fragments himself … to turn himself … into a stranger … who will recognize me after? … I’ve written myself into someone else … the only thing the writer asks … to become … unrecognizable … above all to oneself … recognition is death … to recognize is to look with one’s eyes closed … but the stranger is a light in the darkness … a beacon for the fearful … when you touch the stranger … there is nothing to fear … the stranger is only terrible imagined … from a distance … I come to you a stranger … so you may practice love … give me your lips … let us fly together in this magnificent labyrinth of fragments … this luminous n-folding … the world’s resplendent immanence …

Fragments on Fragments 2


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