In the densest region of its grammar, the foreign flourishes—like a tension that burns and evaporates the air, like a discontinuous force that shatters the foundations, that destroys the primary for no reason at all. Its titles disavow the function of the word and, even so, seem unproductive before the novelty of what is to come.

In its diffuse boundaries there are no fine edges, no abbreviations, no correspondences or economies; there is no way to justify separation, to intercept the bonds, the dwellings, or the supplements. What exists is pure expenditure, without origin, without lineage. What exists is all excess, exhausted in the principles of dawn. Any act of translation is inefficient, insufficient—a betrayal, a painful attempt to reach and touch the skin of other worlds, of other bodies and other tongues, all of them irrigated by extreme words.

Because these languages are the extreme; they are themselves external and, truly, foreign: they are the other skin and the skin itself, difference itself. Because everything is different… because it was willed that way. And because it is unproductive to speak of novelty without the novelty itself—the novelty of our thousand tongues.

Every secret kept within belongs to its outside: its exteriority, like a disobedient freedom that screams from without and lights the house through its cracks, its splits, and its crevices. A secret impossible to trap within a university, or its method, or the grammar of its colleges and congresses. We should already know: from one new secret another arises, and with it, two more—and at least one—always one—remains outside, and outside the letter too.

In this terrain of the secret and the secret of the tongue, situated in the desert of writing—which still does not belong to us, nor correspond to us—we barely attempt to trace a mark, or a trace. This mark, already directed, and redirected even before marking, is for you and for those who, from an excess of memory, carry on their backs the sweat of their tongue, and inhabit its color and its mourning, its pain and its restrained imagination, sometimes overflowing, filled with full happiness or concealed melancholy. This mark, in you and for you, is a secret situated at the crossroads, at the collision of paths, in the clash of civilizations, hidden in some yet. There, around there, or even closer—beside some yet—still arises that poetics that skirts the real in another way, an other knowledge that, even now, dislocates words to disconnect them from their usual referents.

That is why I tell you:

I have one—one only—one desolate tongue, one single desolate tongue that watches over my steps. That unfolds into a thousand. And these steps, walked and forgotten, will become the new mark, a mark that rewrites over all things, a rewriting that dislocates what it inscribes. I have one tongue for this and for that, one for the mother and the friend, another for the merchant and the usurer, and still another for the nights of full moon and for abyssal darkness; I have a tongue for the storms that are coming. I have a specific tongue for every form of authority: a tongue that splits into two, and three more; and in becoming three, it overwrites itself, to avoid being apprehended. This tongue I have, full of pure impurity, brushes against the skins of other languages, delights in their joy and frustration.

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Ulises Matamoros Ascención, 2025