“Head on my shoulders I received the positive buried now in my deepest / interior it came from everywhere it is / in me it is mine now it / overflows me”, writes Samuel Buckman before noting that his existential pigeonhole is empty…

Remains “all that remains”, as Beckett said. Namely that little which can be something beyond appearances when they nevertheless become more and more transparent. Which is not a “cine-cure” when the screen of the psyche goes blank.

Of course, like all living species, everyone still eats what they can. Just to keep going. So much so that “ a homogeneous substrate hovers over our roots”, nourishes them in the language where there is no longer a language but where it still speaks on the white expanse.

Everything remains here in this existential raking which remains above all a matter of language. It is this which at least allows – far from wandering – to count the bricks which are slowly walling up even if they too are not visible. So much so that it is impossible to find something to hold on to where these bricks create a wall of language without rough edges and without hope of finding them again.

This is why, Buckman writes, “in my language / no language.” Or at least he claims it's all empty in there. Or even… Because we have to see this language and its “rabble” who never stop talking and say “shut up” if necessary.

And this because, since the dawn of time, beating around the bush of the world and existence, language – ignoring even its name – remains otherwise inconsistently behind. But isn’t that how something moves forward? Even if she tucks her tail between her legs, into her deepest hole. But ultimately in this return upstream, always, “it” moves forward – and this book proves it.

Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret

Article published on Libr-critique on July 10, 2022:
[Chronicle] Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, Samuel Buckman: wall and lamentations. | libr-critique (t-pas-net.com)

Buy the book online: This little and everything capsizes – Éditions Exopotamie