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Writing life and loveSantiago Cols aa Dept. of Romance Languages & Literatures, 4108 Modern Languages Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1275,USA

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2006

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 11 number 1 april 2006

Whats the hurry, in the end? You cant walkfirst and later enjoy the landscapes, or theversere . . . I seek things, I remember others, Ireturn to the poems, and in addition I go andI come, I love, I play, I work, I wait, I hope,I despair, I consider. And it all forms part ofKeats, because I am not going to write abouthim, but rather walk by his side and make ofthis, in the end, a diary [. . .] I simply enjoywalking through my memory, arm in arm withJohn Keats, favoring every type of encounter,presentation, and citation.

Julio Cortazar, Imagen de John Keats 19

The late Argentine expatriate author JulioCortazar was still a young man when hewrote this, around my age and not yet a famous

writer. Hed only publish his first collection of

short stories later that year, 1951. And hed move

to Paris to begin the second half, the famous half,

of his life. No Hopscotch yet, no Blow Up, no

Cronopios y Famas, none of these have yet been

written, maybe not even conceived. The manu-

script from which this comes would run to

some six hundred pages and would sit in a desk

drawer, unseen, until after his death.

Methodology (metodologa) is the chapter

heading under which the words appear in his

book on Keats.

In the pages that follow I want to show you

what I found as I followed Cortazar on this walk

that he began as a young reader of a young John

Keats. I want to share the perspective this

methodology, this walk, offers on how

Julio and so you and I might think about

being, knowing, making, living, and loving.

I know its customary for me to tell you in

advance what I found, and part of me would

really like to. I know in a way wed both feel

better if I did. But on the other hand Im afraid

that might spoil the walk for you. I think it might

be more enjoyable and more in the spirit of things

to have you just join along and find what you

find.

1

Petrone is a Buenos Aires businessman who

comes to spend a week in Montevideo closing a

deal. On a tip from a friend he takes a room in the

peaceful, almost deserted Hotel Cervantes.

Everything about his stay is routine: the room

is clean and ordinary, his business progresses

smoothly, and he even has leisure time for the

newspaper and a cabaret, though neither is

remarkable enough to arouse his interest.

Everything is normal and satisfactory, except

that he cant sleep because of the soft cry of a

santiago colas

WRITING LIFEAND LOVEjulio cortazar andgilles deleuze

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/06/010199^9! 2006 Taylor & Francis GroupDOI:10.1080/09697250600798110

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baby in the room next to his. Something has

disturbed his sleep. Something has awakened

him. This happens four times in the story. The

first time occurs in those first minutes in which

persist the remains of night and of dream and

he thinks that at some moment hed been

disturbed by the cry of some creature (Cortazar

1994b, 311). Petrones sleep is disturbed by the

cry of a baby who (he is told later) doesnt exist.

But the cry exists because it keeps him up at

night. So it is real, even if theres no baby there

because it produces undeniably real effects.

Petrones responses to being awakened to

dismiss the cry as a dream; to dismiss as a

deception the managers assurance that there is

no baby; to dismiss the baby as a hallucination of

the hysterical solitary woman who occupies the

adjacent room all involve rationally explaining

away the phenomenon in order to get back to

sleep. Finally, when each of these explanations

melts away before the heat of the persisting

phenomenon, he flees in terror. Petrone hears the

baby crying from the other side of the door, but

he never tries to open it, to pass through it. The

condemned door behind the wardrobe in his

room, the ghostly door that carries the memory of

the building that the hotel now occupies, the

door: at one time people had entered and exited

through it, banging it shut, leaving it ajar, giving

it a life that was still present in its wood that was

so different from the walls (Cortazar 1994b,

312). Even though, or maybe because,

he glimpses the presence of that past life

embedded in the grain of the wood; even

though, or because, that door demands he

assume some kind of responsibility, Petrone

still treats it like an ordinary non-functioning

condemned door. This door isnt so much

a symbol of or a metaphor for something as it is

a metonym, a piece, a tip of the iceberg of an

entire way of perceiving and experiencing being

in the world that Petrone an ordinary business-

man who just wants to sleep does not want to

accept.

In reflections also first inspired by his reading

of Keats, Julio offers Petrone some advice, in the

form of his description of something he calls

participation. Participation for Julio

refers to a way of relating and relating with the

things of the world. To know, Julio quotes

Levy-Bruhl,

in general, is to objectify, to objectify is to

project outside of oneself, as if the thing were

strange, what one would know. [. . .] Theessence of the participation lies, precisely, in

erasing all duality; in spite of the principle

of contradiction, the subject is at the

same time him or herself and the being in

which he or she participates. (Cortazar 1994a,

272; 1996, 519)

Participation, then, for Julio is more than just a

way of relating. It also by its contrast with to

know in the passage above suggests a way of

relating that facilitates a form of understanding.

Participation so understood takes as its point

of departure the assumption that there is

an essential inter-being of the things that

make up that world. Participation suggests

that we might get ourselves into better relations

with that world if we stopped thinking of

ourselves as outside of it. Or to put it another

way, if we stopped trying to get ourselves

outside of it.

Julio wouldnt be alone in adopting this

perspective. I think Gilles Deleuze was after

something similar when he developed the idea of

becoming. To become, he asserts,

is never to imitate, or to do like, nor to

conform to a model, whether its of justice or

of truth . . .One and the same becoming, asingle bloc of becoming, or, . . . an a-parallelevolution of two beings who have nothing

whatsoever to do with one another. (Deleuze

and Parnet 23)1

Becoming could be among other things a

way to talk about knowing as participation

without splitting things up into subjects and

objects. This view of becoming, Im sure, guided

Deleuze when he wrote about other authors. So

when he tells me to Think of the author you are

writing about. Think of him so hard that he can

no longer be an object, and equally so that you

cannot identify with him (Deleuze and Parnet

119). I take him to be encouraging me into a

becoming with the author, an understanding

without or beyond subjects and objects.

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Something like Julios walk with John Keats

perhaps.2

2

In Julios work this basic way of seeing our being

and knowing in this world that I have been calling

participation derives from something that struck

him repeatedly in his studies of Keats: the sense

or awareness of the porosity of the membranes

separating him from the people and things

around him, and those things and people from

each other. Over the course of his correspon-

dence, Keats lets drop time and again a certain

notion that returns and is formulated in relation

to concrete cases that worry him: the notion of

being invaded by the personality of those who

surround him (Cortazar 1996, 490). This idea is

everywhere in this book: Keats as a kind of

ecstatic chameleon, broken-up in his encounters

with the world. Keats poems are just the diary of

the trip.

This sense of permeability, this compassion

(feeling with), lies at the bottom of that

attitude toward citation that Julio expresses here

in the Keats book for the first time in writing: if

I quote because I want to (Si cito porque me da

la gana) and not to impress or dominate its

because the wanting gives me the quotes (es que

la gana me da las citas). When the little-stick-

that-speaks begins to do so for another, I respect

that habitation of a spirit that uses me to repeat

itself, to return from its tomb. Voracity of the

poet that overflows his own books, invading alien

ones (Cortazar 1996, 19). Some time later, hell

say this again, at the beginning of Around the

Day in Eighty Worlds:

You may have noticed the quotes rainingdown, and thats nothing compared to whatwill follow (that is, almost everything). In theeighty worlds of my trip around the day thereare harbors, hotels, and beds for Cronopios,and besides, in quoting others we citeourselves, its been said and done more thana few times, only pedants quote to be correct,whereas Cronopios quote because they areterrible egotists and they want to gather theirfriends together . . .Robert Lebel, for example,who described this book perfectly when hesaid: Everything you see in this room, or in

fact in this building, was left here by the

previous tenants. So you wont find much that

pertains to me, yet I prefer these random

appurtenances. Their diversity keeps me from

being limited to a single mode of reflection;

and in this laboratory, whose resources I have

systematically inventoried (with the opposite

of the conventional valuation, of course), my

imagination is less inclined to measure its

steps. Which is something I know it would

have taken me more words to say. (Cortazar

1986c, 7)

It turns out that Lebel, whom Julio cites here, is

himself citing Marcel Duchamp, and the whole

thread of borrowed words leads Julio to affirm

the relation between such joyful, friendly citation

and that sense of substantiality, the being alive

that lacks in so many of our books, that writing

and breathing (in the Indian sense of breathing as

the ebb and flow of the universal being) not be

two different rhythms (Cortazar 1986c, 7). And

it is worth remembering that the Spanish word

cita, that Julio uses here for quotation, also

means encounter or meeting, as in the concrete

actualization of a relation.

So this attitude toward citation echoes Julios

method of chronicling his walk with Keats, that is

to say his record of the moving relations that is

their walk together. Gilles Deleuze explained in

an interview why he wrote about David Hume

and the empiricist philosophers. They made, he

said, a vital discovery, the certainty of life

which, if one really adheres to it, changes ones

way of life. It is that relations are external to

their terms (Deleuze and Parnet 55; original

emphasis).3 Its the idea that relations between

things are not subordinate to those things.

Relations are just as much things as things.

Peter is smaller than Paul, The glass is on the

table: relation is neither internal to one of the

terms which would consequently be subject, nor

to two together (Deleuze and Parnet 55). They

have a life of their own, relations do, and so do

Julio and Keats, each made up of relations, and so

does the relation that is recorded in that book.

In this insight Deleuze finds a vital protest

against principles. Indeed, if one sees in it

something which runs through life, but which is

repugnant to thought, then thought must be

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forced to think it, one must make relations the

hallucination point of thought, an experimenta-

tion which does violence to thought. Empiricists

are not theoreticians, they are experimenters

(Deleuze and Parnet 55). This is because the

history of philosophy is encumbered with the

problem of being, IS (Deleuze and Parnet 56).

But the empiricists think with AND. For

Deleuze, to think with AND makes relations

shoot outside their terms and outside the set of

their terms, and outside everything which could

be determined as Being, One, or Whole

(Deleuze and Parnet 57). This all sounds too

technical and serious perhaps. Consider Deleuzes

thoughts as a way of describing what happens

when you step into the forest of Julios citational

encounters. Its really quite simple. Deleuzes

AND simply connects things, like us with the

world around us.4 Dewey made connection the

foundation of his theory of experience and of art,

and cited John Keats attitude as a prime

example. As Deleuze says, with a tremendous,

earned simplicity: Try it, it is a quite extra-

ordinary thought, and yet it is life (Deleuze and

Parnet 57).

3

This all smacks of the tom-tom and mumbo

jumbo, and also sounds a little technical, but not

when you suspend routine and open yourself to

that permeability in which Antonin Artaud saw

the poetic act par excellence, the recognition of

the dynamic and internal destiny of thought

(Cortazar 1986b, 33). Indeed, in Julios world,

this basic way of seeing being and knowing that

I have been calling participation is constitutive

of creative power and what is life if not

the ceaseless manifestation of creative power, the

ceaseless production of the new? I love the

corridor for which this passage is the opening: an

extraordinary description that is also an example

of the poetic act par excellence, the process he

would elsewhere call invencion.

Invention is the name that Julio gives to

the process of creating something new by an

immanent rearrangement of the relations com-

prising something old: precisely the way that an

anagram makes a new word from an old word,

adding nothing from beyond (no transcendental-

ism), taking nothing away (no repression); merely

experimentally rearranging the relations among

the given elements (Colas). Here it is important

to recall that the etymological roots of invention

lead us to the Greek heuresis and so evoke the

image of stumbling upon something, encounter-

ing in short, a cita. Its versatile applicability to

generative processes ranging from physics to

biology to philosophy to literature partly explains

the vital urgency with which Horacio Oliveira, at

the beginning of Julios most famous novel

Hopscotch, announces that in an age in which

we run toward deception through infallible

equations and conformity machines, our

possible truth must be invention (nuestra

verdad posible tiene que ser invencion)

(Cortazar 1966, 38384).

When I read these words, Julio springs to life

and begins to give me advice, like a mentor or a

friend. He first suggests I create the conditions in

my life and my self: suspend routine and open

yourself to permeability. In another moment,

Julio will combine these in the simple counsel,

borrowed from Fred Astaire, to let yourself go.

Suspend routine, break habits. Like Henry Miller

staying up all night, forcing the body to lead the

way into the crack the always closing elevator

door through the sticky brick of habit

(sticky brick is what Julio called it in the

Preface to Cronopios and Famas; or the Great

Habit in chapter 73 of Hopscotch).

I look through dog-eared pages, souvenirs

from an earlier transformative journey through

Henry Millers Rosy Crucifixion, but the passage

Im looking for has slipped back, hiding in the

shadows of the hundreds of thousands of other

words. Instead perhaps they are in league with

each other and this is a diversionary tactic

another passage leaps out in front of me, waving

its arms, ears wiggling, laughing off the walls.

Speaking of the creative artist, Miller gives me

another way to think of the conditions essential

for the poetic act par excellence:

Acceptance is the solution: it is an art, not an

egotistical performance on the part of the

intellect. Through art, then, one finally

establishes contact with reality: that is the

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great discovery. Here all is play and inven-tion . . . the world has not to be put in order:the world is order incarnate. It is for us to putourselves in unison with this order, to knowwhat is the world order in contradistinction tothe wishful thinking orders which we seek toimpose on one another. The power which welong to possess, in order to establish the good,the true and the beautiful, would prove to be,if we could have it, but the means ofdestroying one another. It is fortunate thatwe are powerless. We have first to acquirevision, then discipline and forbearance . . . thehumility to acknowledge the existence of avision beyond our own . . . the great joy of theartist is to become aware of a higher order ofthings, to recognize by the compulsive andspontaneous manipulation of his own impulsesthe resemblance between human creation andwhat is called divine creation. (Miller 213)

The humility of which Miller speaks, toward

which he prods me, is what Julio is after when he

says let yourself go. It is detention, understood

as a reflexive verb, as it is more commonly in

Spanish, to hold my self back. I try saying it like

this let your self go. Now I try it like this: let

your self go. Let it float away, my self, the name

given to the desire to order and impose cause and

effect. Maybe it works for certain purposes, but is

an absolute handicap for the sort of voyages Julio

and Henry are evoking here.5 In Cronopios and

Famas, Julio gives Instructions on How to

Sing. They begin like this: Begin by breaking

all the mirrors in the house, let your arms fall to

your side, gaze vacantly at the wall, forget

yourself (Cortazar 1969a, 7). Can we let our

self wither, like yellow leaves that any slight

stirring of the air takes off a tree (Nietzsche

244). This humility can only be achieved, as

anything else, through practice and repetition.

Now, with the essential conditions in place,

I can relish the gorgeous vision that comprises

the poetic act par excellence. This vision

consists in a perceptual or physical and very

often non-linear rearrangement of preexisting

elements so as to release the secret connections

(think with AND!) they have with each other

and with us. First Julio describes the intuition of

archaic, magical origin that there are phenomena,

even physical objects, that are what they are and

the way they are because, in some sense they also

are or could be other phenomena and other

things. Julio might want to call this archaic,

magical, or intuitive, but if it is, something very

similar is todays most advanced model of life

itself. All members of an ecological community

are interconnected in a vast and intricate network

of relationships, the web of life. They derive their

essential properties and, in fact, their very

existence from their relationships to other

things (Capra 298). Now, what but dead

knowing and lifeless writing could issue from a

position staked on denying or fleeing such

relationships? Indeed, how can we call ourselves

alive if we resist such relationships?

Perhaps such a vision seems fantastic. But

Henry Miller explains why we might be tempted

to give it that name. In works of fantasy the

existence of law manifesting itself through order

is even more apparent than in other works of

art. And how beautiful. Im brimming with joy.

How extraordinary that Henry should have leaped

to my ear to speak of fantasy when I am walking

slowly through the works of Julio Cortazar.

Perhaps the fact that Julios vision was com-

pletely in tune with what we now see as the nature

of life itself isnt life fantastic? explains why

someone like Henry Miller could enjoy in such a

vision the mysteriously healthful effects of an

elixir. Miller again: Such a creation, which is

nothing less than pure invention, pervades all

levels, creating, like water its level. Now another

constellation explodes into view before my eyes.

First, theres that word: invention. But Henry

also draws a line connecting that word with the

action of water which, as the Tao Te Ching

observes, touches the ten thousand things and

does not strive (Lao Tsu Eight). Pure process.

Something, Henry now concludes, is present

in works of fantasy, which can only be likened to

an elixir. This mysterious element, often referred

to as pure nonsense, (tom-tom and mumbo-

jumbo?) brings with it the flavor of that longer

and utterly impenetrable world in which we and

all the heavenly bodies have their being.

Henry has indeed shot me back among the

stars, now the stars of other people who have

written and thought about inventing secret

connections. The world, Julio once wrote,

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is a badly resolved problem if it does not

contain, in some part of its diversity, the

encounter of each thing with all the others.

The poet, he continued, if she cannot connect

them by intrinsic features, does what everyone

does when looking at the stars: she invents the

constellation, the lines linking the solitary stars

(Cortazar 1996, 30102). We make the constella-

tion by inventing. Im inventing constellations,

making a road by walking around among the

solitary stars of words Julios, Millers,

Deleuzes. And perhaps a reader will traverse

some of these paths and see these patterns. But

maybe also, without meaning to, I will expose a

previously hidden cloud of stars and the reader

will then have the joy of inventing her own turtle

or bear. But I cant know or guarantee that. I can

only take the leap of faith up among these stars

and hope that you will join me.

Any point of a rhizome can be connected to

any other, and must be. These are the principles

of connection and heterogeneity (Deleuze and

Guattari 1987, 7). A rhizome is what started me

on this walk, the rhizome comprised of Julios

writing-walking Keats. I dont want to squeeze

that rhizome into the framework of a single

unifying thesis. Id rather leap from star to star.

Its okay if I get upside-down or change falls out

of my pockets. Itll wind up somewhere and so

will I.

4

Critical to the kind of creativity that flows from

seeing ourselves as participating in being con-

ceived as a multiplicity of relations composed of

more relations and so on all the way down is

letting go of our usual way of thinking of

language as offering us a representation or picture

of the world. Instead, we might do better if we

were to understand language as one of the tools

we have for bringing forth of creating, that is,

or inventing a congenial set of relations between

the bits of the multiplicity we usually call I and

the bits we usually call the world.

Paradoxically, the vitalism Deleuze finds in

the work of art derives from the artists intimacy

with death: What little health they possess is

often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or

neurosis, but because they have seen something

in life that is too much for anyone, too much for

themselves, and that has put on them the quiet

mark of death. But this something is also the

source or breath that supports them (Deleuze

and Guattari 1994, 172). Is it an accident that

Julio was unhealthy and, according to most who

knew him, had a strangely vital relationship to

death? That his wide infant eyes witnessed the

beginning of a century marked by incomprehen-

sible levels of deaths? Julio himself understood

the intimacy of life and death: precisely because

deep down I am a very optimistic and very vital

person, that is someone who believes in life as

profoundly as possible, the notion of death is also

very strong in me (Cortazar 1978, 28). Deleuzes

assertion concerning the vital function of art

might provide another way of understanding

teaching and learning to live better (the only

solution that Julio could offer to the over-

whelming mark of death in his century):6 to

elude the bars of the self and the personal and the

organism in order to unleash the flow of life.

Why do Julio and his characters like to play at

shuffling heterogeneous elements until they dis-

cover or invent a secret subterranean homogen-

eity that links them and lights them up into

pleasing neon constellations? Maybe because, in

their vision of life, we are ourselves nothing more

than just such elements, shuffled into figures and

arrays and patterns. Juan exclaims: Oh, to give

in to that moving framework of instantaneous

nets, to accept ones place in the deck, to consent

to whatever shuffles and deals, what a tempta-

tion (Cortazar 1973, 42). Invention now displays

another one of its effects. Now you can see that

invention lets us see, and even manipulate in

miniature, the dynamic of those inexplicable,

barely describable anti-laws that, our habitual

attachment to the idea of a sovereign ego

notwithstanding, might be governing our lives.

Morelli says these anti-laws work beyond reason

and description. But he does not mean that words

cannot evoke these. Far from it. Indeed, if Morelli

is right, then this also helps to explain why Julio

so often identifies invention with poetry (in its

etymological sense of making). True, language

cannot represent those magical forces they move

and shift much too quickly and chaotically

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for language. But language can generate when

its symbolic, rhetorical, and expressive dimen-

sions are emphasized or deployed verbal

iterations of what that something does with

the heterogeneous elements including human

beings that make up the universe. Language

can, in short, create real relations.

Think, Italo Calvino encourages us

what it would be to have a work conceivedfrom outside the self, a work that would let usescape the limited perspective of the individ-ual ego, not only to enter into selves like ourown, but to give speech to that which hasno language, to the bird perching on the edgeof the gutter, to the tree in fall, to stone, tocement, to plastic . . .Was this not perhapswhat Ovid was aiming at, when he wrote aboutthe continuity of forms? And what Lucretiuswas aiming at when he identified himself withthat nature common to each and everything.(Calvino 124)

Julio gives us such a work, he gives it to us the

way you give a friend a cold, or joy: so that they

have it too.

It comes from that chameleonic quality,

something he admired deeply in Keats for

whom, as for Basho: to know something is to

participate in it in some way (Cortazar 1986a,

147). The little boy in The Poisons knows this:

I liked to throw myself face down on theground and to smell the earth, feeling itunderneath me, warm with its smell ofsummer so different from other times. Ithought of many things, but above all of theants, now that I had seen what the anthillswere I stayed thinking of the tunnels that criss-crossed all over the place and that nobody saw.Like the veins in my legs, that you couldbarely distinguish below my skin, but full ofants and mysteries that came and went.(Cortazar 1994c, 305)

Deleuze observes that:

the kind of physical movements you find insports are changing. We got by for a long timewith an energetic conception of motion, wheretheres a point of contact, or we are the sourceof movement. Running, putting the shot, andso on: effort, resistance, with a starting point,

a lever. But nowadays we see movementdefined less and less in relation to a point ofleverage. All the new sports surfing, wind-surfing, hang-gliding take the form ofentering into an existing wave. Theres nolonger an origin as starting point, but a sort ofputting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to gettaken up in the motion of a big wave, a columnof rising air, to get into something insteadof being the origin of an effort. (Deleuze 1995,121)

Maybe this helps explain the difference between

Petrone, or someone like him, and La Maga

(or the woman in La puerta condenada) and

people like them. The apparently exceptional

in Julios universe works like the wind or the

motion of the waves, even like gravity.

When people like Petrone become aware of

that force or movement, their thoughts and

deeds strive to apply energy and resistance,

opposition, to subdue it. But the woman in

the story, or La Maga, or the children in

Silvia, they are different, they surf, or

hang-glide, they seek to enter into that surprising

order of things.

5

Which is another way of saying they understand

and are capable of love. Love, writes Thomas

Merton,

demands a complete inner transformation. . .We have to become, in some sense, theperson we love. And this involves a kind ofdeath of our being, our own self. No matterhow hard we try, we resist this death: we fightback with anger, with recriminations, withdemands, with ultimatums. We seek anyconvenient excuse to break off and give upthe difficult task. (Merton 1960, 1819)

No wonder Petrone went running. This experi-

ment can be scary. I must accept what feels at

least at first like total vulnerability (not that

my sense of self could ever truly protect me).

What if I am rejected? What if I am left alone

here? What if through the others eyes I see

that I must make changes? But the effect of

accepting this vulnerability is the rushing

feeling of tremendous growth, far beyond the

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dimensions permitted by a cramped and clinging

sense of self. Julio once tried to explain that

sexuality becomes invention at the moment that

one sees ones own pleasure as inseparable and

conditioned upon the pleasure of another

(Cortazar 1978, 69). I dont know if Julio himself

lived this way, though everyone Ive talked to

who knew him well agrees that he did, even when

they agree on little else. Certainly, much of his

writing exercises this capacity, explores it,

experiments with it, using and abusing rules of

grammar and syntax as a means of overcoming

the condition of the skinny, embarrassed cats.

And then invention comes back as the

discursive mode appropriate for love. For love,

Julio tells me, it would be easier for me to

communicate in language in the infectious,

moving way that others communicate in music

or kisses when I can give up my attachment to

language as a device for representing some thing

outside of it. I want to communicate that way

because communicating that way is the best way

to touch others and to be touched, to come

together with others in language. Without that

kind of communication, whether I am using

language or music or kisses, I am alone (even

if I dont seem to be) with a whole canefield

of words grown up between me and others

(Cortazar 1966, 95).

But Julio, describing a certain Lucas theory of

communication, suggests that there is another

way for Bruno and Horacio and myself to

communicate with our angels without giving up

our beloved words:

as rarefied as the air of his writing might be, as

much as some thing can only come and go

with great difficulty, Lucas never ceases to

verify whether the coming is valid and whether

the going takes place without major obstacles.

Little he cares about the individual situation of

the readers, because he believes in a myster-

iously multiform measurement that in the

majority of cases fits like a well-cut suit, and

thats why it isnt necessary to give ground in

either the coming or the going: between him

and others there will be a bridge as long as

what is written is born of a seed and not

a graft. In his most delirious inventions

theres something that at the same time is

so simple, so little bird, and so gin rummy.

Its not a matter of writing for others but

for oneself, but oneself must also be the

others . . . (Cortazar 1984, 1617)

If we could see words this way: not as snapshots

of things but as things themselves, coming and

going, that touch people, that produce effects,

the way that kisses and music make you shiver or

laugh or dance, then perhaps our words would

carry the germ of life, infecting and enriching

our angels. Perhaps then, instead of caging

ourselves our angels having flown in verbal

representation, we might build

bridges connecting us with our

angels. Perhaps, then, we

could really come, change,

and stay together.

notesI would like to thank Charles Stivale for the stimu-lus and invitation that gave rise to this particulararticle, and Felicity Colman for her tireless,generous, tender, and effective editorial work onthe essay.

1 See also Deleuze (1983, 19^25) and Deleuze(1992,169^86).

2 This same point is elaborated from thetwo apparently very different perspectivesof Catholic mysticism and American pragmatismby Thomas Merton (1993, 143^44) and JohnDewey (1917, 31). Both encourage that we viewknowing more as the event that punctuates asuccessful process of intelligent mixing with theworld.

3 And see also, for a more extended discussion,Deleuze (1991, 21^36, 85^104).

4 See also Dewey (1980,13^34), who makes Keatshis prime exemplar of this connective stance.Also, for a view of relation as one of the definingconditions of life, see Capra (36^50, 158^59,298^99).

5 For a broader consideration of the culturalinflections of this kind of thinking see Batchelor(37^68) and Heidegger.

6 In Unos de tantos d|!as en Saignon (Cortazar1969b, 22^27).

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Santiago ColasDept. of Romance Languages & Literatures4108 Modern Languages BuildingAnn Arbor, MI 48109-1275USAE-mail: scolas@umich.edu

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