The other one, the one called Tucker, is the one things happen to. I bike through the streets of Hampden and Remington, and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically in body and mind, to look at the rednecks on the Avenue and the hipsters with their dogs; I know of Tucker from my emails and see his name on a facebook newsfeed or on a blog. I like old scotch, Yiddish words, 19th century music, the taste of herring, and the prose of Stefan Zweig; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns into the attributes of an actor. It would not be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship, but I live, I go on living, so that Tucker may contrive this blog, and this blog justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid posts, but those posts cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to language and to the future. Besides, I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things (to say nothing of plagiarizing).
Borges knew that Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Tucker, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in this website than in many others or in the laborious playing of a violin. Two years ago I tried to free myself from him and went from the mythologies of an artistic career to the games of internet writing. But those games belong to Tucker now and I shall have to imagine other things. Thus my life is a flight and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.
I do not know which of us has written this post.
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