As Minus Plato careens towards its end, my librarian (who is and is not Mr. Minus), continues to gather books at my prompting. For today’s selection, it is all about words, words, words, all over everything. (You know the score). These books about words contain worlds (and wounds) and, within their pages, they almost seem to breathe. (Just creep into pages 80 of the anthology Stronger than Bone: On Feminism(s) and take in Kim Hyesoon’s ‘Asphyxiation Day Forty-Six’ (“Hence breath/Then breath/Next breath”, and so on, until “Breath till the bitter end”, and beyond). Conspiring together, these books are at the heart of our library of the future, and at their center is the artist, writer and publisher Paul Chan, without whom Minus Plato would never have started itself ten years ago. As with so many of my dispatches from these shelves I haunt, this will inevitably be a placeholder for something yet to come. At the same time, it locates my librarian’s positionality within the perfidious structures of settler colonialism and how Indigenous futures necessarily put him in his place. Each post is itself a fragment of an insufficient and very public apology to come about the incessant drive for oh so many books to come. It is also, following Miriam Cahn, a writing in rage beyond the its own settler moves to innocence. This is all to say (mere words words words) he is typing today with my imagined voice in his ear, to pull himself apart and in doing so adding a minor footnote to the score written by Heid E. Erdrich, in her first poem in her first collection Fishing for Myth, called ‘True Myth’, which begins:
Tell a child she is composed of parts
(her Ojibway quarters, her German half-heart)
she’ll find the existence of harpies easy to swallow.
And which ends, in a beautiful triumph beyond words and beyond anything I can have him write here:
She is the myth that is true.
