AFTERWORD, INTERIM Comments

Turning, returning again: to unattainable places.
Where being is, but no staying. But where are we after all, where should we stay if not in verbindung, we'll keep in touch, in the transiency of what touches us, remembering. Each other. And unattainable places, other times, other worlds, underworlds, floating islands, fields of words, AREALE, non-places: ou tópoi.

Turning, returning again: to the beginning in which, as scripture says, WAS the word, das wort WAR - WAR in another language: the father of all things. A word, ein wort, a mort-ification, the sore spot, a neuralgic point at the end, of the sentence, of life . . . a full stop. Fixations, terminated, brought to a standstill, lifelessness, blank spaces, bullet holes. Whiteflash: and words like snowflakes on a winter's day.

Turning, returning again. But not straight to the point, not cutting to the chase. Not point-to-point on a line, that subject-predicate-object firing-line, one-liners, wieldy definitive state-ments, bullseyes. Proceed via GO, make another point, the other half of the semicolon, of a colon: go to the beginning, not back. At every beginning of a genealogy there are two, a pair, knots in the net, in the web.

Turning, returning again: to a material, some 3000 years old, Penelope's web, where night by night is undone what's been made, the daily to and fro of the shuttle is reversed, a movement and its counter-movement, a texture spreading out into time, what stays for the time being are the warp threads, vertical; the one weft, though, horizontal, comes and goes, and both return.

Turning, returning again: to the sea, and from the shuttle to the ship, to the journey of all journeys: the Odyssey, a return from a war, a ten-year return from ten years of war, with reversals for Odysseus, the versatile man, the man of twists and turns, anér polýtropos, or: on many keels. A journey embarked upon with many companions from the victorious side of the war; returning he is alone.

Turning, returning again: to the alpha at the start of the alphabet, the first vowel, the text at the start of the story-telling whose first word is ándra, its first and final letter. A word: a man, an alpha male, who tells the story and of whom it tells, whose name gives the story its name, that it takes away from him (he takes from himself): who at one point says his name is Nobody, which sounds almost like a slip of the tongue - oútis, Odyss . . .

Turning, returning again: to the One, who says "I" as he calls himself Nobody, keeps his name to himself, counts, starts with one and zero, says Not-I and mine, mine the power, mine the story, makes his way, straight down the line: father & son. Addition, subtraction, bigger than, smaller. (An "I" that ramifies like a root, √1 with two results: one to the real, -1 to the imaginary, were it tHEiR imaginary unit, perhaps also of HER and HIM . . . )
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