A General Theory of Oblivion

BLINDNESS

I’ve been losing my eyesight. I close my right eye and I can only see shadows now. Everything confuses me. I walk clinging on to the walls. It’s a struggle to read, and I can only do that in sunlight, using stronger and stronger magnifying glasses. I reread my last remaining books, the ones I refuse to burn. I have been burning the beautiful voices that have kept me company over all these years.

I sometimes think: I’ve gone mad.

I saw, from out on the terrace, a hippopotamus dancing on the veranda of the apartment next door. An illusion, I’m quite aware of that, but I did see it just the same. It might be hunger. I’ve been feeding myself very badly.

My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I’ve read so many times before, but they’re different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right.

In these mistakes I find myself, often.

Some pages are improved by these mistakes.

A sparkle of fireflies, fireflying through the rooms. I move about, like a medusa jellyfish, in this illuminated haze. I sink into my own dreams. One might perhaps call this dying.

I was happy in this home, on those afternoons when the sun came into the kitchen to pay me a visit. I would sit down at the table. Phantom would come over and rest his head in my lap.

If I still had the space, the charcoal, and available walls, I could compose a great work about forgetting: a general theory of oblivion.

I realise I have transformed the entire apartment into a huge book. After burning the library, after I have died, all that remains will be my voice.

In this house all the walls have my mouth.