I know a place where there is no where. I know it not because I’ve seen it, but because I’ve never seen it. Because I’ve never seen it, I can make it up as I go. This is the fiction of home.
To make a place, I take an object. A foreign object, for an object punctuates a space, inscribes a memory. The pitcher my grandmother gave me, white with red berries, which I use as a vase. Or the writing on the wall that only I can see. I make it up as I go.
There is a silver tray on the floor in the corner with an empty samovar and bowls of dried roses on ice. I see a pyramid of dates decomposing on the counter, the sticky syrup spilling down the sides, trapping fruit flies in the kitchen. Can there be an oak tree in the middle of the room? Yes. This is the fiction of origins.
I put stale walnuts in a tub of salt water and dry herbs in a basket. No one is here to eat with me. No one is in the no where with me.
The no where is inside of me, a cipher, a not that, a no where, a not here, a not there.
Listen, I have seen the writing on the walls. This is how I know no where.
Know where is home, for the writing won’t always be there. Know where is home, for it is not on stable ground.
Four walls, a roof. Enclosed, protected. What kind of paradise is this? What one is enclosed in, one struggles to get out of. Close your eyes and try to picture it.
The non-existence of the self. The self constructed through its own negation. Place constructed through its own negation. Origins constructed in the cipher, in the sefr, the not, the nothing. What does the empty signifier afford the fractured subject? I suppose it matters not, and I suppose this is why it matters.