3

Duras:

“Finding yourself in a hole, at the bottom of a hole, in almost total solitude, and discovering that only writing can save you.”

Because I am surrounded by people who murmur with no voice.

Because I am surrounded by people who die with no voice.

Because everywhere houses and streets and cities and states and nations collapse with no voice.

And then one day I am listening to Raúl Zurita speak and he is answering a question about why nature, why the rocks, the sea, and the mountains have been so important to him; and he says that the beaches and the mountains and the sea were so much kinder to the bodies that were thrown out of airplanes than the military or the government had been. He does not explain this any further, and no one presses the point. But afterwards I can’t help but think, forever, about absorption. About what it means to be absorbed. About how a community, a city, a country, a nation, absorbs, or refuses to absorb, its bodies, its ghosts, its citizens.