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and small bedside table. The second panel’s viewpoint is divided between a direct look at the back wall holding the alpine postcard and including the bedside table, and the bed framed by its footboard, to the right of the panel’s centre but left of the central space between panels. Like the viewpoint between panels or the hyphen between the two terms of the work’s title, the bed frame divides and holds together an entity in which neither part stands for the whole, between which my sight must traffic. The colours of the postcard have changed slightly and details are less clear. It’s no longer the same given, but now part of this panel, and an invitation to remember the postcard on the panel over there, to the right. I am trying to read two sides at once, postcard-like. The atmosphere of the room with its white, functional furniture is institutional: this is a road trip, not a homecoming . On the bedside table I see money, more postcards, and an ashtray which holds a cigarette and a brightly burning small fire. I look immediately to the right through the bed frame, the foot rail blurred from being seen too close. The foot rail both pulls me closer to see and distances its enclosure, which is in sharp focus, distinguishing a separate, private space. The rail frames a bed and pillow, blanketed in brilliant blue, slightly disordered and tense with the impression of someone’s body. The empty bed is intimate, compelling; I look for you. All these traces of things which pass (money, postcards, flames), including my thoughts of you, are a category of the circulating and evanescent. A narrative moment, or better , a moment through which time passes, is photographed, calling me to see, and disappears as I look over there. In all your returns, iris-IRIS, commercial and otherwise , traces of time passing are what you send, but time passing does not seem a loss, but full of possibilities. Standing here, I feel your appeal: “Be there! Love me!” Well, yes, what is the message of a photographic postcard? With one full side taken up by the picture and half of the other reserved for the address, postcards have little space for their ostensible purpose. But it doesn’t matter, really. Think of how many times have you written several to me and put the bunch in an envelope to mail. I send them anyway, and so do you, you who attached it to the(se) wall(s); they keep popping up. I send postcards to close friends or to someone I love with the implicit message : “I am here, now—wish you were here. Love.” Now, though the postcard might call, do I really wish you were here? Seated (maybe) at a table below Mont Blanc, I send this postcard as evidence that this glorious and highest peak in Europe is now my scene. I do not send an airline ticket. What would I do if you were really here? Would we like to take the same hikes, eat the same food, sleep the same hours, visit the same museums, argue over the same pictures? Maybe you wouldn’t like it here. It could be very burdensome. I might be enjoying even more the possibilities of your absence. Since you are already here in my imagination , which might be preferable, the message of the postcard has already 154 FIGURING REDEMPTION “See You Later (Au Revoir),” With Love 155 arrived as a direct call, a “house call,” self to myself, with no operator in the way. Is this internal, self-sufficient calling circuit—with no unpaid debts, no illicit affiliation—my true and guilty desire? But no, I needed the postcard and its legible appeal. While Heidegger’s Dasein had to accept its indebtedness to the deictic I-you structure residing inside language, in the call to itself it masters the difference .25 Certainly neither Dasein nor the reciting poet commits, signed, to contaminating circulation by IRIS or the everyday legibility by unknown others. The postcard’s return to the same place on both panels (exhibited at or just above eye-level, depending on one’s height) visually holds the panels together and me in place before and between them. Yet, they are neither the same, nor is this such an easy a place to occupy. My first place before and between the panels is pulled down to one side by the partial frame...

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