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sonorous leafy reality here on the page:
     
    look at it over there, on the slight prominence of that stretch of ground: opaque amid the opaque mass of the trees, look at it, unreal in its brute mute reality, look at it unsaid:
     
    the reality beyond language is not completely reality, a reality that does not speak or say is not reality;
     
    and the moment I say that, the moment I write, letter by letter, that a reality stripped of names is not reality, the names evaporate, they are air, they are a sound encased in another sound and in another and another, a murmur, a faint cascade of meanings that fade away to nothingness:
     
    the tree that I say is not the tree that I see, tree does not say tree, the tree is beyond its name, a leafy, woody reality: impenetrable, untouchable, a reality beyond signs, immersed in itself, firmly planted in its own reality: I can touch it but I cannot name it, I can set fire to it but if I name it I dissolve it:
     
    the tree that is there among the trees is not the tree that I name but a reality that is beyond names, beyond the word reality, it is simply reality just as it is, the abolition of differences and also the abolition of similarities;
     

     
    Hanumn emerging out of Surasa’s mouth. Lucknow, 20th century. Surasa: she-devil.
     
    the tree that I name is not the tree, and the other one, the one that I do not name and that is there, on the other side of my window, its trunk now black and its foliage still inflamed by the setting sun, is not the tree either, but, rather, the inaccessible reality in which it is planted:
     
    between the one and the other there appears the single tree of sensation which is the perception of the sensation of tree that is vanishing, but
     
    who perceives, who senses, who vanishes as sensations and perceptions vanish?
     
    at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing with a certain haste in order to reach the end (which end? what end?) without having to rise from my chair to turn on the electric light, still taking advantage of the setting sun that is slipping down between the branches and the leaves of the mass of beeches planted on a slight prominence,
     
    (it might be said that this little mound is the pubis of this stretch of ground, so feminine is the landscape between the domes of the little astronomical observatories and the gentle undulations of the playing field of the college,
     
    it might be said that it is the pubis of Splendor that grows brighter and then darker, a double butterfly, as the flames on the hearth flicker, as the tide of the night ebbs and flows),
     
    at this very moment my eyes, on reading what I am writing, invent the reality of the person who is writing this long phrase; they are not inventing me, however, but a figure of speech: the writer, a reality that does not coincide with my own reality, if it is the case that I have any reality that I can call my own;
     
    no, no reality is mine, no reality belongs to me (to us), we all live somewhere else, beyond where we are, we are all a reality different from the word I or the word we;
     
    our most intimate reality lies outside ourselves and is not ours, and it is not one but many, plural and transitory, we are this plurality that is continually dissolving, the self is perhaps real, but the self is not
I
or
you
or
he
, the self is neither mine nor yours,
     
    it is a state, a blink of the eye, it is the perception of a sensation that is vanishing, but who or what perceives, who senses?
     
    are the eyes that look at what I write the same eyes that I say are looking at what I write?
     
    we come and go between the word that dies away as it is uttered and the sensation that vanishes in perception—although we do not know who it is that utters the word nor who it is that perceives, although we do know that the self that perceives something that is vanishing also vanishes in this perception: it is only the perception of that self s own extinction,
     
    we come and go: