The notes Roland Barthes began to write the day after his mother’s death. His mourning diary. His elegiac, spare meditations on grief cut up into fragments (how she, the mother, is in fragments). The quartered typewriter pages he kept on his desk, scraps he would write on with pen and ink, all while writing this other work on photography. How the mother suffuses this other (more major?) text, as he thinks through how a photograph is a sign of absence, what is not there.
What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence.
All I do is take notes around this thing.
I circle aroundwhat is not there.
- Kate Zambreno