26 July 1996 or 01.00.0000.ai
subject: a year and a day Z
Letter twenty-five being unfinished, I am
completing it here in the extra day of a fairytale
year, beginning from the last line of that letter:
'But then came a revelation, or so it felt to me.
(I began ...'
... yes, I began to realise that whatever it is
that came to me in the dawn of the 25th, that vast
notion of 'new time' (and of which I made so many
notes that I cannot yet condense them to coherent
words, not yet anyway) is nevertheless a simple
thing, (and also very old).
Not simple like the square or the circle perhaps,
but it is simply the old old question: of being
present here and now.
For instance, this moment is unlike every other in
'the universe' or in 'history', and is not at all
explained by such verbal constructions as those,
or by big bangs they are nowhere near to
truth.
Truth? That's not a word you ever use and it's
certainly not a place.
I know you don't use it, says William to Edwina
(for this is where they fled from letter seventeen
a few minutes ago) but ...
and now it is midnight and this is the moment when
the book was to end.
And it has.
There is little sound except from the refrigerator
and the occasional traffic after midnight but
everything is now completed and it's time to
transmit.
In a few minutes I shall be sending off to
ellipsis these not-yet-corrected-versions of
letters one to twenty-five.
Yes, I've decided to let them go in all their
roughness and let version 1.0 be on the net
exactly as it is. For to permit that is to be a
part of what is newly happening, and not a critic
anymore.
Not for the moment anyway, for it's the design of
every moment that is so vast, and so beyond what
can be said, rhythmically or otherwise.
.
(I'll let that be the final paragraph, just a
single full stop he types not smiling yet the text
is surely breathing as this moment's in the words
...)