The last phone call: his voice somber, tormented, hollow. It actually trembles, and I am filled with terror. —Jean Daive, I don't see you any more. Why? Almost sobbing. We talk. We must see each other. We make an appointment for Avenue Emile-Zola. Two days later, nothing. Nobody. Paul Celan has disappeared. On Monday morning of April 20, 1970, Gisèle on the phone: —Jean, did you see Paul on Sunday? No? I'm worried. I'm without news. Paul has disappeared. My distress afterwards. Lasts and lasts. A month of emptiness, of anguish. Of no solid ground. Days absolutely empty. I feel his death in me as a break with the human world. With language. I can imagine the night, the Seine, the Pont Mirabeau per-haps, no doubt (the bridge already named in his poems). A Sunday. And Gisèle. Day after day during the wait, the disappearance, the flight, the going away, the lack of signs. Day after day. In tears, on my birthday. At the Vagenende There and elsewhere. Lost in Paul's death.

“We must see each other.”

Jean Daive, Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan; tr. Rosemarie Waldrop

« Le long couteau du flot de l’eau arrêtera la parole. »

Le jour, les jours, la fin des jours (Méditation sur la fin de Paul Celan) — Henri Michaux

“The long knife of water’s flow will silence speech.”

In one of Celan’s Romanian poems: “I offer my fingers to oversee that the symmetry of this posthumous flora is safe from danger. Once again I am refused. All that remains is to resume the journey, but my strength is nearly gone and I shut my eyes to look for a man with a boat.”

At midnight, echoes of Paul Celan. The added section… “My life is over, for during the transport he has drowned in the river… he was my life. I loved him more than my life.” I think of the Seine; I think of fifty-six years ago.

Returning to Malina. “Life is reading a page that you have read, or reading over your shoulder, reading with you and not forgetting, because you don’t forget anything. Life is also walking around in this void, which has space for everything.” (tr. Philip Boehm)

April 8, 1969. Cioran spends his birthday on the beach at Berneval. In the evening, he writes about a sense of kinship with the waves. The next day, Belleville-sur-Mer: “A most beautiful abyss.”

We might not have Criterion Channel in Europe but there’s Arte, and so I am watching Mikael Karlsson’s rendition of Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia with the Royal Swedish Opera on my phone as I walk along the river, with salted almonds in my pockets and seashells from the Black Sea.

A little something I wrote at the time about her poetry: sublunaryeditions.com/magazine/mer...

“How bright you are, my unlived day…”

Today marks 110 years since the birth of Romanian poet Magda Isanos, whose poetry I’ve read all my life, and had the honor of gathering and translating in 2021. I have not been to her gravesite in a couple of years but soon I will return and read her poems.

An Absence of Sea | a glimpse inside the book
www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o... @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

Stack of books I’ve written since 2020, from the top: An Absence of Sea, Schism Blue, If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, Disembodied, Under the Sign of the Labyrinth

at the gates of everything that is in vain

Thank you, Hyo 🤍

An Absence of Sea on a bed of seashells

An Absence of Sea is officially out today.

www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o...

You can find an excerpt here: socratesonthebeach.com/christina-an...

My gratitude to @erratumpress.bsky.social, @ansgarallen.bsky.social, @greggerkesocrates.bsky.social, and to all of you.

An Absence of Sea by Christina Tudor-Sideri | *out now*
www.erratumpress.com/an-absence-o... @dreamsofbeing.bsky.social

“I read at night, until three or four in the morning. The darkness around you adds greatly to the absolute passion that develops between you and the book.”

—The Suspended Passion, Marguerite Duras; tr. Chris Turner

“To say Time is to say lesion”

—Cioran

“One ought, Milena, to take your face between both hands and look steadily into your eyes so that you would recognize yourself in the eyes of the other…”

💙

Thank you!

she is born in the child the bather the dreamer the double she is born before there's learning of the self of the world a soft trembling something that lingers in the background of every act of life in the child's heart a yearning to be to see the world with the eyes of another with the eyes of all other themselves a version a distant twin born from the same flesh but speaking a different language something forever foreign the first encounter with the double a quiet unsettling when the child sees herself as the one seen and the one seeing as subject and object in the mirror yes both being and becoming it is this knowledge that unfolds in slow waves as she grows and learns a knowledge that never truly arrives that is never truly fulfilled for the double is never static never fixed always shifting in the space between the real and the unreal between knowing and the unknown always growing alongside her like an invisible twin pulling her toward this realm of shadows of doubles she wonders do they live together is there a world of doubles like there is a world of selves of beings even in the light even when she plays when she squints at the sun the double grows not just in imagination but in the very bones of their being the stories they tell become reflections of their own splitting selves the games they play reflections of this desire to occupy multiple spaces to be in many places to wear all the faces all the masks to stand as both the one who is loved and the one who loves the double moves through all this it moves with her through her in adulthood it takes on the shapes of old loves of lost dreams it takes the faces of past selves now unreadable faces with eyes full of longing a weave of light and darkness that stretches across the span of a lifetime in every moment lived this reflection of all selves of all others of all lovers and still not fixed not static the child's first encounter with the double the mirror that is to be shattered again and again (pp 85-86)

One of my favorite passages in An Absence of Sea I wrote for her:

Photo shows a young girl (myself) sitting at a small table on New Year’s Eve in the 1990s, wearing a light pink dress and a red hat. She is holding a vintage wine glass filled with orange juice. Her expression is calm and unbothered. A decorated Christmas tree behind her.

Inner child realizing we wrote five books

“The situation is thus the following: In the lovers’ night, desire fails…”

A return to Michel Henry’s Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh.

Beauty, Burning: The Condition of Music by Daniela Cascella | *out 14 May* www.erratumpress.com/beauty-burni...

“Are we in forgetting here?”
“Not yet.”

Awaiting Oblivion, Blanchot; tr. John Gregg

Falling in love consists of allowing someone to install you inside their head and, once they have you there, trapped forever in their dreams, to do with you as they please; from that moment on you will become a mobile archive inside their body. There is much talk about archives, about the information we register and transmit either through the written word or verbally to those who come after us, but what about that which is forgotten? No archive exists that could ever store all that's forgotten, not because it can never return or be remembered, but because so much is forgotten that the world it occupies is larger than our own by various orders of magnitude. Memory loss, though apparently taking something away from us, also constitutes us. Meaning that when we transmit information, we also transmit all of those forgotten worlds, although in a manner that we are still yet to completely comprehend. This forgetting is me introduced into the heads of others, is my life enclosed in that place, or the part of me accessible only to the person who - in the experience of love - has me inside their head, even though this person (I know) may have forgotten me forever. (Oblivion love)

Oblivion love

The Book of All Loves, Agustín Fernández Mallo; tr. Thomas Bunstead

lilacs out of the dead land indeed

after midnight, entering a day I’ve dreaded for nearly a year, I think of Manet’s unfinished painting of Baudelaire’s funeral—deep green between presence and disappearance, figures gathering without arriving, grief hesitant, as if resisting the crossing into what cannot be undone

In what moment did we invent this language which is ours and ours alone. - she says. The day we understood the uselessness of the lines on our palms, and then the lines on the soles of our feet - muddled but already completely delineated - rose up into our mouths and stayed there. - he says.

The Book of All Loves by Agustín Fernández Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead

“There’s a mausoleum inside our bodies. Our organs have something of both life and death in them, rubble of all we have left behind.”

“we are the sudden upsurge of time”