INTIMACY OF THE SILENCE

To saturate is to satisfy fully, to load to capacity, to fill completely with something that permeates ("an indistinct plenitude which is empty"). To saturate language a writer must silence herself so that the word ("pure passivity of being") is. ("She stiffened a little on the kerb, waiting for Durtnall's van to pass.") ¹ Blanchot explains that tone is not the writer's voice, but the intimacy of the silence she imposes upon the word. ("He was gazing earnestly at the little boy.") ² "The silence is still his. . . he preserves himself within the work." ("At night she would doze off with morphine and my mother and Grandpa each drank in their separate rooms.") ³

Silence is felt as concentration. ("There she was perched, never seeing him, waiting to cross, very upright.") ⁴ Movement within something enclosed. A small action or detail with elaborate internal activity. Logic is tension and tension is transparent. ("He threw coffee on the fires, staining the plastic-soft floor a deep cave brown.") ⁵

Breakups in a contextual, denotative or linguistic sense do not affect the stream of concentration (continuity) which pushes the skin of a word so that (saturated) it will stand alone ("Don't you notice something rather different about his eyes?") ⁶ like a full balloon can support itself.

1,4 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

2,6 Lady Murasaki, The Tale of Genji

3,5 Lucia Berlin, "Dr. H.A. Moynihan" from Phantom Pain, a collection of short stories about to be published by Tombouctou, Bolinas

Other quoted material from Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature