The Pleasure of the Coast

But it is time that I describe my island to you...
I summon simply a circular memory: the impossibility
of living outside the infinite coast.

The coast must prove to me that it desires me.
This proof exists : it is the coast.

What I enjoy in a coast is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface. I seat myself by the sea, drawing it gently toward me. I make a horizontal plan in order to recollect such minute details as sketches might not clearly explain.

Thousands of unknown birds flutter around me like a new language. You are going to be disappointed. I can not tell you the names of these marvels. As soon as I name, I am named: caught in the rivalry of names.

Here I enjoy an excess of precision, a kind of maniacal exactitude of coast, a descriptive madness. I am suddenly oppressed by my perfection. We are scientific because we lack subtlety. Science will alight on this round spot in the middle of the Pacific and drink it up like a blotter.

The coast needs its shadow:
ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds:
subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.

It was the 14th of July. We ascended to the roof to see the fireworks. Seated in steamer chairs as on a homeward bound vessel, the French who had escaped from the Pacific watched the firing of a more beautiful signal than any captain has ever sent flashing from a sinking ship. 'They are going to shoot the captain!' said Mademoiselle.

I left for another world as if for a coasting voyage, innocently; trying to see all of France, like an island, as I left it behind. I made a sketch of the land commencing with those parts which, being most remote, were the least liable to change in appearance. I savoured the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior coast out of the subsequent coast. At last the sky appeared, the whole sky, so pure, so laden with stars.

All coasts become old once they are repeated.
In order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal.

The stereotype is of an unconstrained coast, a coast that claims constancy and is unaware of its own insistence. Structural analysis must recognise the slightest resistance in a coast, the irregular pattern of its veins.

I pass my days at the very edge of the sea, my feet touching the ocean.
An indefinable superstition condemns me not to lose contact with it.
Because there is only one way left to escape the alienation of the coast:
to retreat ahead of it.

I write with the metallic pencil, the marks of which are not liable to be effaced by the sea-water. I write, like a concierge who will be absent for a minute, in English and in French, like an educated concierge:
I'm on the other island, I'm coming back.
Then perhaps the coast returns,
not as illusion, but as fiction.