More books and papers are stacked or spread on my desk. Normally they live on my bookshelves with many other books, in my archive among many other papers, and in my mind and body, intertwined with yet more memories, thoughts and stories. Now they form a small collection together with the postcards, all of them connected through the work of Mette Edvardsen - at least, that's what brought them together on my desk. I imagine them to be a set of thresholds to my memory, or springboards into an imaginary realm to be discovered - something holding a text. Something to hold onto.

Or take the small black notebook sitting next to it, its pages empty save for lineation. It's the one and only black notebook I possess, awaiting a story. A so-called Moleskine, it is not without history, for these notebooks are famous as the ones in which writer-traveller Bruce Chatwin recorded his personal “songlines”. Reaching now for Chatwin's eponymous book, I read: “In France, these notebooks are known as carnets moleskins: “moleskine”, in this case, being its black oilcloth binding. Each time I went to Paris, I would buy a fresh supply from a papeterie in the Rue de l'Ancienne Comédie. The pages were squared and the end-papers held in place with an elastic band. I had numbered them in series. I wrote my name and address on the front page, offering a reward to the finder. To lose a passport was the least of one's worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.” .

Then there is a book with a green cover and faint lilac lettering: How To Do Things With Words. And next to it a bright pink one with green lettering: How To Do Things With Art. For now, I place them back on shelf. Also there: a yellow philosophy book that traces yet another beginning: Zur Welt kommen - Zur Sprache kommen. Yellow. And a stack of novels by Paul Auster, Italo Calvino and Enrique Vila-Matas I might want to delve into later on. .

Three more publications await my attention. They are all by Mette Edvardsen. They are all white with black lettering. The first one is a large size booklet that reads Opening. On the first page it says: “This text is a written documentation, a collection of notes, a list of sources, a performance score and a description of the piece Opening by Mette Edvardsen.” The second one is a book with a white cover, blank except for the spine, which reads every now and then. The third is a booklet with a mere list of words on flimsy paper that makes the words shine through. Its first word is “table”, the last one “black”. In between are all the words used by Mette Edvardsen in her performance Black. Here I will start, once more. .

Slowly my memories of the performance come back, but I try to inhibit them and read on. “small / book / big / print / two / three / sticks / and / one / stone / dead / things.” Now my mind travels to another collection of traces from Black, an installation in the theatre foyer with black objects arranged in a perpendicular grid, with one empty spot. A page before I had come across a “dog”, or at least the word “dog”. Maybe the animal is still running loose in the theatre. I imagine it sprayed over with mat black paint as well. The telephone goes and I try to ignore it but find I am distracted, can't tell exactly where I am, where my mind is. .

I start reading again from the beginning until “water”, the point of deviation. I know now there is “coffee” ahead, but some words will remain missing. For instance “jazz”, “crocodile”, “sunlight”, or “red / carpet”, not to mention the dust on top of it and the stories swept under. No wait, in the middle of the booklet “dust” is brought to “speak” and even “sing / song / say / yeah”. And then further on “the / shape / quite / distinct / but / obscured / by / dust” and even more “shapes / and / thickness / of / dust”. I now also remember “tiny / particles”, and looking for the words I discover a “carpet”! .

Again my memories of the performance come back, and again I try to inhibit them for a moment and carry on with reading. “cup / plant / chair / window”. I look out of the window and now don't want to inhibit my memories of the performance any longer. I flip through the booklet until I find the following words: “fresh / air / window / on / one / side / see / nothing / there”. Again I look out of the window, and though the glass is dirty I see something there. Nothing in the text, something out there. This doesn't feel right. I'm stuck. A window in a text isn't a window in the world isn't a window in the theatre. This is the actual point of deviation where one bumps into boundaries. As much as I like to compose my own experience as a reader or spectator, words and things and their particular organisation also have a hand in this, a thousand invisible hands. .

In Travels in the Scriptorium, Mr. Blank suffers some kind of writer's block, haunted as he is by everything he has written in the past. Many characters turn up again and confront their author - Mr. Blank alias N.R. Fanshaw alias Paul Auster - who is for once totally vulnerable, as he realizes something about time and memory. Where Auster has widely explored the rather ambiguous power of writing to forget, in Travels in the Scriptorium this entails a reflection on the violence implicit in authorship. It becomes clear that all these characters have no future because it wasn't developed by Auster, but also no past. They were created to live in the here and now and cut themselves loose from the narrative fabric of their own lives. Now they live in the scriptorium, a kind of asylum where oblivion reigns. Mr. Blank thinks his only chance to go on living is to circumvent his medication, forget about the past and continue writing. No, it actually resides in a few gestures, a choreography of memory almost: he is rocking in his chair, or sliding and skating on the floor in his nylon socks, and finds himself carried back to his childhood. .

Reading about her aim “to make things appear” in the announcement of Mette Edvardsen's Black, my first association was another Paul Auster novel I'd recently read. In Man in the Dark Auster explores a persona that is at once character and author, pulled back and forth between different realities, eventually trapped in an impossible situation that has both poetical and political overtones. The writer's fantasy starts like this: “I put him in a hole. That felt like a good start, a promising way to get things going. Put a sleeping man in a hole, and then see what happens when he wakes up and tries to crawl out.” .

Words, gestures and the realities they call forth didn't coincide after all, they had inadvertently grown thick with memories and projections. The steady repetition and staccato rhythm of the words scattered the promise of narrative, time and again creating focus on singular things. Yet as vehicles of attention, their traces would linger in the space and rub against one another in my mind. To sometimes appear out of the blue and, in a performative rather than descriptive act, colour the situation with their detached existence: “yellow yellow yellow yellow yellow yellow yellow yellow”. .

Each word contained a particular spell, the hocus pocus of appearance. Holding on to the memory of the table pushed slightly to the right, I revisit the words in the booklet once more, hoping to retrace some of the performance's beginnings and endings. It's the latter I keep bumping into, realizing how much the theatre is a space of disappearance after all, of fleeting time, memory and melancholy, and ultimately a place haunted by death. Before closing her eyes and uttering the last word “black”, Edvardsen had pre-empted several endings, talking about dead things and how they don't change, seeing nothing through the window, or conjuring up a dead body, to later on lie down herself covering up her actual body with a carpet of words and venturing into deep sleep with the wayward logic of a child's game, or scribbling something on a paper to then crunch it and throw it almost into the bin, successfully cleaning up a wet spot, or saying, accompanied by a clear mimetic gesture, “erase erase erase erase erase erase erase erase.” .

Where do these realities go? Some of the objects found their way to substance and out of the black box to reappear, sprayed over with mat black paint, as a still life in the theatre foyer. Right now, they're probably in a storage space somewhere. Save for the dog, which is still missing. Or maybe they've taken up their place and function in daily life again. As words they ended up in the booklet, a small archive waiting to be revived by readers. And one shouldn't forget the minds and bodies of all the spectators, for memories do linger, just like Mette Edvardsen closing her eyes and uttering the last word “black” while the space remains lit, was as much an ending as a new beginning, not in the least because it's the one word she'd said only once, suspending the seven repetitions and turning the single word into a beacon marking a promise. “black black black black black black black black”..

In footnote 28 the narrator admits to a friend that “I once spent a whole summer with the idea that I had been a horse. At night the idea became obsessive, it homed in on me. It was terrible. No sooner did I put my man's body to bed than my horse's memory came alive.” His friend points out that “nothing you say surprises me” and that the so-called exclusive experience concerns actually the embodiment of a story by Felisberto Hernández. Creator of a “fictional phantom space” and of “strangled voices”, this inventor of absence was famous for leaving his stories unfinished or at least open-ended. .

Revisiting these stories, Vila-Matas' commentator is particularly intrigued by one of them: “Many of his unfinished endings are unforgettable. Like that of “No-One Turned the Lights On”, where he tells us he was “among the last, bumping into the furniture”. An unforgettable ending. Sometimes I play at thinking no-one in my house turns the lights on. From today, having recovered the memory of Felisberto's tales without and ending, I shall also play at being the last, bumping into the furniture. I like my lonely man's parties. They are like life itself, like any of Felisberto's stories: an unfinished party, but a real party at that.” .

I looked for another book and met a man telling me “I am the Man behind the window. My author is Gerrit Krol, who wrote me in 1982.” And after a physical self-description - colour, amount of chapters and pages, cover text - asked me where I wanted to start reading. Since I have the habit of reading books from the beginning, I started with the first page, to then continue chapter after chapter. The main character Adam is a robot, born as a small black box and reflecting upon its becoming more and more human, which doesn't happen without glitches despite its striving for perfection. The language of computer code doesn't quite place Adam in this world, and when his hardware is worn, he ends up in the trash bin. He knows poetry and emotions, but vulnerability remains maybe the one thing inaccessible to him. .

When his leg happens to be stuck and won't afford him the ease of walking, I got excited and started to run, browsing through the book more quickly and skipping chapters, eager to track down and read all the passages about walking and leg gesture. The living book knew where they were and found them effortlessly inside his chest. Now my memory fails me to reproduce them, though I remember thinking of Roland Topor's The Tenant, in which a loose limb inspires a meditation upon identity, a passage I do actually recall without its paper support: .

“I was wondering. A tooth is a part of ourselves, isn't it? Like a bit of our personality. I remember in the newspaper, a man lost his arm in an accident and wanted to have it buried in the cemetery. The authorities refused. The arm was cremated and that was that. I wonder if they refused to give him the ashes and if so, by what right? Tell me. At what precise moment does an individual stop being who he thinks he is? Cut off my arm. I say, “me and my arm.” You cut off my other arm. I say, “me and my two arms.” You take out my stomach, my kidneys, assuming that were possible and I say, “me and my intestines.” Follow me? And now, if you cut off my head would I say, “me and my head” or “me and my body”? What right has my head to call itself me? What right?” .

As if guided by the question how one stands in the world, Italo Calvino embarks in Mr. Palomar on descriptions of visual experience, anthropological commentaries and meditations that venture into the speculative, all of this neatly organized into brief chapters according to specific rules. His protagonist starts on the shore, aiming to read the waves, or better to look more closely by isolating and analyzing a single wave, and somewhat later finds himself swimming in the sea, surrounded by the late afternoon sun just before it sets, pondering whether the rays of light exist out there or in his mind only, and while his strokes grow weary and hesitant, his thoughts navigate a disembodied world until floating debris makes him feel like a corpse. “Mr. Palomar thinks of the world without him: that endless world before his birth, and that far more obscure world after his death; he tries to imagine the world before his eyes, any eyes; and a world that tomorrow, through catastrophe or slow corrosion, will be left blind. What happens (happened, will happen) in that world?” .

In front of me I have two copies of Calvino's Mr. Palomar, in Dutch and English translations. Which language should I choose? Unfortunately I don't read or speak Italian, or better I don't understand the words and would find myself curiously out of sync in case I'd learn the book by heart. Perhaps the experience wouldn't be unlike one of the anecdotes Laurie Anderson tells between the songs of her Live at Town Hall. “Lately, I've been doing a lot of concerts in French. Unfortunately, I don't speak French. I memorize it. I mean, my mouth is moving but I don't understand what I'm saying. It's like sitting at the breakfast table and it's early in the morning and you're not quite awake. And you're just sitting there eating cereal and sort of staring at the writing on the box - not reading it exactly, just more or less looking at the words. And suddenly, for some reason, you snap to attention, and you realize that what you're reading is what you're eating... but by then it's much too late.” .

I pick up the book with the yellow cover, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk's Zur Welt kommen - Zur Sprache kommen. Since it contains a series of lectures, I imagine Sloterdijk's words would flow with a certain ease from my mouth. Or perhaps they would stumble once in a while, for German is not my native language after all, though I do read, speak and understand it. The words might displace me, but then language also places one in this world. Such is exactly the philosopher's take on the meaning of literature, which is indebted to the “preliterary text of life”. While Mr. Palomar is swimming in the ocean facing death, Sloterdijk travels down the other end, desiring to be afloat in the womb yet facing the impossibility of being present at one's own beginning, one's coming into the world and coming to language. We are brought to speech by others, relieved by a long tradition of storytelling: we don't begin, we are begun. “Man covers up the gap of origin with stories, and starts to be entangled in narratives, because he is a being that can't own his beginning.” Between one's physical and narrative births resides what Sloterdijk calls the “dark, speechless nights of the infant”, resonant in one's life and stories as the memory of a profound silence. .

The book contains photographs only, sometimes an empty or coloured page, no written words, save for the title on the spine, every now and then. Even when the protagonists bring in a microphone, the book remains curiously silent. Turning the pages, I remember the noise of a large group of spectators with this book in their laps, flipping through the pages, duly following the performance's unfolding, setting about their own mental voyages upon a deviation of photographed and enacted scenes, quickly paging ahead looking for coincidence, slowing down again when taken by surprise or when the performers on stage claimed the attention. The sound of a hundred or so people flicking the pages was an auditory trace of everyone composing their own experience, jumping between the offered markers of attention, all the while observing their decisions - a noisy flurry in itself stirring one's imagination in the shared space provided by the theatre. Now I am alone with the book, struck by the silence of the microphone, the empty page at its base and the objects sitting around, all of this in contrast with the subtle sounds of my flick upon flick. .

A chair, a plant, an apple, a water bottle, a notebook, a cup - as traces of earlier performances, all these objects, as well as the actions they afford and the memories they carry, are swept under the carpet, muffled by the space, swallowed by a black page. They yield to a white page, to new objects, coloured shirts and coloured pages. White. Grey. Red. Green. Yellow. Blue. Once the stuff is cleared out, the sansevieria, truncated throughout most of the book, appears for the first time in full, as a new beginning. Then, after dimming the light the page turns black again, and the protagonists return to take a bow.

The book doesn't contain traditional credits, but lines up the protagonists and all the objects, from the speechless microphone to a stack of white paper and a roll of blue tape. There is one object that must have appeared both in the book and in the performance every now and then without my noticing it: a brown padded envelope, so many of which featured in Mette Edvardsen's group performance or else nobody will know. It's a piece of unaddressed mail, like a message in a bottle, adrift in the theatre and the book, waiting to arrive at an uncertain destiny, or perhaps turning into a dead letter. .