shadow of Sisyphus. His toil instructs us that being is only ever after. Camus's conclusion that “Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux” (One must imagine Sisyphus happy) is an enjoinder, a plea, a perverse lament, and indicative of the manipulations of the absurd upon thinking, or of the absurd in thought. To think is to be besieged; to think with Sisyphus is to live in conjunctive agreement with one's suicide, with the tacit acknowledgement that the suicide of Sisyphus is an undisclosed murder, with which each is unavowably complicit.    N.
                                                                              Chicago, December 2010

¹ Ingeborg Bachmann.
² Tr. Philip Boehm.
³ Bachmann.
⁴ Pierre Jean Jouve.
⁵ Tr. Lydia Davis.

Photograph in exergue: wire_sky_rust, RY King, 2010, with permission.