I don’t want to force things with images from the past or explanations of the present, which always sound false. I’d rather let the form itself speak, so it reveals its contents bit by bit of its own accord. However, I can’t reveal that I’m waiting for it to give something away, because that would send it slipping straight back into apparent emptiness again. I need to be alert but with my eyes half-closed, as if I were thinking about something else entirely and had no interest in the discourse taking shape. It’s like climbing into a fish tank and waiting for the waters to settle and the fish to forget they had ever been disturbed, so they move closer, their curiosity drawing them toward me and toward the surface of the tank. Then I’ll be able to see them—and perhaps even catch one.

What I can’t do is imagine a reader other than myself—I’d be afraid of boring anyone else with page after page of nothing, of subjecting them to my dissimulated waiting game, my somewhat interpretative approach to revealing the form. Perhaps a reader who isn’t me would already have found something of the true content of the discourse in these lines. The thought of this alarms me even more than the thought of being boring. How humiliating to give myself away to the reader before I’ve given anything away to myself, blissfully unaware that anything’s been given away at all! And by now something almost certainly has. For a start, this image that’s arisen of a hypothetical reader who’s more perceptive than I am strikes me as very paranoid. The discourse is revealing its paranoid side. Well, I suppose that’s something. But I worry that this discovery, which tells me nothing about the contents of the discourse, has sent the fish in the tank shooting off in all directions.

Let’s wait a bit. Think of a distraction. Since it’s difficult not to talk about anything, the best approach would be to distract the discourse by filling it up with trivial things, things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand and don’t so much as allude to my distraction-related tactics. I need to turn my gaze away from the discourse and onto some insignificant alternative topic. It’s up to me to choose one. I could, for example, talk about the weather (which would have the advantage of getting rid of the hypothetical other reader, the one who’s more perceptive than me, once and for all).