Wonderwater: Alice Offshore
by Roni Horn

Annotated by Louise Bourgeois

"I was always aware of the possibility of silence falling
like the cover of a tomb and engulfing me forever."

"Where are you on this earth?
Nothing is material in space."

"The anatomy of a want
we know what we want and we know we will not get there-
a blobby world
I want to go up and down and instead we're going
around and around
obsession or confusion?
it is not so much where my motivation comes from
but rather how it manages to survive."

"In torment there are islands of silence."

"Experience of emptiness.../until I am convinced of her existence."

"I am trying to make you understand how grateful I am. It is my gratitude, my thanks, my appreciation for your goodness that is going to touch you and make you understand that you cannot abandon me. - Like the freezing mornings, like the endless crowd in the subway, like all the germs carried by infinite breath, like all the eternal phenomena, my thanks for your kindness covers my body like scales or feathers or hair. I kill myself trying to make you understand. It is my responsibility to make you understand.

The burden of proof is on me. I know it and I am taking care of it."

"Closed world of which I see the boundaries and which I can control. I am at ease in it. There is no fear of being lost.

Is life passing me by?

That is what fear does- it establishes the distance between the immediate and the eternal."

"Making Being Here Enough

Euphoria is absolutely necessary to stand the bleakness,
the cruelty, and the loneliness of this place.
Your presence is all I need. You don't have to talk,
you are all I need."

"I cannot help this need in the morning, it is stronger than hunger or thirst."

"You see the reverberation of this admission of sadness. I fell in disgrace; it is the worst, it is the fall, it is finished, save me."

Annotated by Anne Carson

"She felt a thirst, she got up to stand at the window and cool her skin. Bloodbeads have their weight for the wearer. Now I've got it, now I'm in it, now I've got to know."

"Madness is something you 'go.'...Black bile obliges thought to penetrate and explore the center of its objects, because black bile is itself akin to the center of the earth."

"I am one too now
a fugitive from God
a wanderer
who trusted in mad strife." -Empedokles

"This madness so grand, so gentle! I don't know the world."

"I can swim like the others only I have a better memory than the others, I have not forgotten my former inability to swim. But since I have not forgotten it my ability to swim is of no avail and I cannot swim after all."

"Weeping at the strangeness of the place."

"Often enough I tried language often enough I tried song but they didn't hear you. - Holderkin
Hear whom? There are degrees of radicality at borders; some you can cross, some you can't. The uncertainty is what makes them interesting. Is what makes them borders. A page has a size. A self has a flesh. Defy this; if language goes beyond reality, go there too. Of course there is danger. Anyone who slipped would find themself impaled. Foucault talks about a flash of lightning that harrows the night, a violence that leaps at its own core. You kiss my eye. You cross me. Here is the speechless place. Beget what we are."

"When
rough
you

Because
I plundering
fight
alive."

"Is not the drift beautiful at first? Drift, drifting, you into me, can anyone drift? Everywhere you drifted into me did you not burn away a bit of my lung? Can anyone burn?...Do the ones who burn know it? Do they know only for that time? Afterwards can anyone bear to know it? Do they not simply put it down the ravine? Does everyone have a ravine?"

"He wants to name a doubleness that inhabits all things and prevents them from ever actually coming into being or going out of being. Birth, death, these terms are inexact."

"No use trying to prattle your what into a mystery. But tell what you see, tell what the blood was like, and maybe a gesture will form. Probably unbearable. Certainly unclean. And then you will go ahead with your exile."

"Presence occurs when a thing is what it appears to be." -Roni Horn

"Geometry begins in a practical desire and leas on to purest ideality. But those perfect circles and angles and edges are not real, we cannot draw them. Kakography: we draw imperfect shapes and pretend they are pure for the sake of the proof."

"You feel this hair as a jolt of what should not happen...You in all this. You utterly violable."

"Have pity on this moment. Often enough I tried language but they didn't hear you."

Annotated by Hélène Cixous

"Il n'y a pas de here properement dit.
Tout est là. Here est niché dans There
Les lettres de here habitent There...
I hear your voice on the phone and you are: here.
Here is the secret name of your presence in my soul."

"Every contemplated face becomes landscape...everything continues to become."

"Each time I would descend blindly into the throat of night I was burning to dream burning dreams, to be burnt in dream, to burn myself at the dream...it was this greed this corrosive thirst of the heart, this need for Him, my sole bread, my sole wine, the forever one and only, this piece of God, my only hungering."

"Love that is to say terror."

"Just as the spider misleads itself when it claims to be unable to live without the fly, telling the truth which is misleading, for the fly is able to believe that it is life for the spider, but it cannot know in what manner, so you write to me, I need some explanations."

"Thereupon you write to me that you plunge into my letters as if into a maleficent forest wanting out at every sentence the retractile forest draws its branches around you, you advance looking for the way out, flight, you write to me, if you turn left there is the void if you turn right you will drown, besides you can feel yourself becoming damper and darker and more and more wooded, as if you too were becoming a forest creature."

"I do not, I admit, write you letters, I send you the coals and the remains of my combustion."

"Or maybe it was one of those slips of the tongue what you meant was 'the love of you' and you said quite the opposite. Love is not a net, it does not capture, it does not understand, it does not go fishing, it does not put its hook in, it lets go it licks and does not gulp down."

"We will not hear ourselves any more, we'll see each other and we'll no longer understand one another proximity will become a distance impossible to cross, each of us alone with our solitude."