Vanquen

On every page there was a drawing of a flower, with text above, below, to the sides, even creeping between its leaves. I asked if it was the book "Flowers of Love" by Ramon Llull, but he shook his head. Then I asked him to translate the text, but he said it could not be translated. There was one place though, a kind of confluence which he described as a "necessary meaning." It was, he said, the declension of the verb "vanquen", which begins: "I am not, yet I shall be," and ends: "They are not, yet they shall be." I asked, then, why the confluence should be here of all places, and he said that it was for this reason alone that the text was composed in cipher. "Which reason?" I repeated. "I have already answered you," he countered. Then I asked if a "necessary meaning" were akin to an "original utterance", in which the word and the thing coexisted, the word calling forth the thing, the thing collapsing back into the word. He said yes, though it was more accurate to say that the word for a time called forth the thing, and the thing for a time collapsed back into the word. So I asked about the significance of "vanquen", and why it should be so important. "Our judgments are perfunctory, short-lived, born of their time," he said easily: "None of these qualities constitutes a reason to hold them, or not to hold them ..." But even as he spoke, I realised that what he said had another agenda; he was striving, without arousing suspicion, to weigh each thing equally, as though any imbalance could only be borne so far, -- beyond which point, like a kind of fury at the possibility of beginning, a rage at the very heart of birth, all language and all things, by way of the confluence, would be ensnared, fused and broken apart; everything would be carried imperatively into everything else.