Am I to be recovered from these resurrected pictures? Hours, days spent shuffling photo upon photo, pausing on one, then another, staring at a face, a tree, a horizon for minutes on end, laying them out on the table or the floor, arranging and rearranging them in a neverending series of haphazard grids, searching for that–that–which is not there, not in the image, but rather all-but-there, out of the image, with the image, without the image. A void that seeps through, burns through even the most opaque surface of these images that can be no thing but surface to me… but for the void, the spaceless, the diffuse empty regions that somehwere begin to appear to me, though the surface of the image, of each and all of these images, remains unaltered despite my continual reassembling, my obsessive regard, my methodical searching and researching of that which is not.

What, then, is that which is not? What is that which begins to appear in the image—in the faces, the trees, the horizons—that is not, and, by virtue of this emptiness, this absence, begins to assume a form, a shape, contours, the suggestion of a presence that is, nonetheless, [word illegible]? (I, 14a)