... all these words,

You begin with the impression that everything has been said already, there is nothing more to say, while at the same time, of course, nothing has been said, everything remains to say, a familiar enough kettle of fish, nothing strange in that. and so you begin, without knowing how to begin, having no alternative but to begin, in the end, but to begin, nothing strange in that. And so you go on, letting the words find their places, letting the words that come come, that remain remain, that will not serve or stay put or fuck this grammar, new sentence make disperse in the silence soundlessness of their falling, nothing be easier simpler than that, could it?

And where you go matters little too, as long as you go, as long as it's you, as long as it's somewhere, or nowhere, it matters little where, or how, or when, or why,

it's a way of writing, of going on, of going on writing, to listen to the voice within you, the voice which has spoken to you ever since you could talk, which you used to call God, or your soul, or your conscience, in the days when you believed, and when it falls silent now, as so often in the days since you believed, you strain to hear, faint, faint, almost imperceptible, other voices, other lives, other lies, so many voices, so many strangers,

and when these other voices stop fall silent cease the silence, too, you listen with other ears to the silence, the silence with a voice too all its own, with its soundles murmuring and the soundless words it soundlessly whispers breathes, and sooner or later after a while you realise that you recognise know this voice, you know its phrasing and its intonation, repeating itself again and again, but somehow inexorably plodding ploughing on, what could be more ideal than to allow the voice of this silence to speak, what could be more nameless, more anonymous, more 'Beckettian'?

Who then is speaking? Is it the 'author'? But to whom can such a term refer since anyhow he who writes is no longer Beckett but the urge that sweeps him out of himself, turns him into a namless being, the Unnamable, a being without being who can neither live nor die, stop nor start, who is in the vacant site where speaks the redundancy  of idle words under the ill fitting cloak of a porous, agonising I? (Blanchot 1988: 25)

In your youth you dreamed of an ideal interlocutor correspondent, you dreamed of writing letters never sent, never sent because never written, never written because you never knew the address, and no address because there was no one, no one but you and you voices and you stupid hopeless vain desire to write,

and now once again you begin to speak and you hear the voice of that other voice, you stop speaking and the silence too is the silence of the other voice, and you ask, you hear it ask, the same old questions, Who speaks when I say I speak? Who is this stranger I hear when I hear myself speaking?, the old questions without answers never answered, asked for the sake of hearing again the old familiar questions,

you imagine, as Walter Benajim imagined, a writing composed entirely of quotations, where you do not say but allow to be said something which never was yours to begin with, where you get at least at the heart of speechlessness through the words of others, but that gets you nowhere so,

you imagine lying as a way into your own voice, you say again, unbelieving this time, it's not me, no one has spoken, it's all lies, but all your lies turn out to be half truths, or quarter-truths, one-eighth truths or one-millionth truths, poisoned by tiny particles of truth, until you despare of ever uttering the pure genuine true falsehood which would be your voice at last, until in the end

you imagine you are imagining yourself to be the little wooden mannequin that in reality you are, you tell yourself you are lying when you say I am me, no, better and in this way you pretend that the stranger who speaks within you is the only voice you know, that the voice you once called your own is only one of his fictions, a trick to make you think you can think, think you can speak, when all you can do is listen uncomprehending to the words flowing through you,

you run your fingers over your little wooden skull, imagine the thoughts it contains, little wooden thoughts, hollow thoughts, worm-eaten thoughts, thoughts that knock together like musical blocks, or little thoughts on wheels that you tug along with a string, and what words do you say now with your wooden clack mouth tongue lips, wooden words, borrowed words, idle words, or sad and lonely lovely words from your little wooden heart now the puppeteer is dead?

all these strangers ...