Peter Greenway’s film A Zed & Two Noughts (A.K.A. Z00) [1985] begins with a swan crashing into a car, killing two people. The driver survives, but lives the remainder of the film as an amputee having lost her right leg. By film’s end, the amputee decides to remove her one remaining leg and falls in love with another double amputee.

David Cronenberg’s film Crash [1996] begins with a car crash in which one of the drivers is shot through the windshield of one car into the other like a torpedo. The torpedo dies, but the two characters who survive develop a pleasure for car crashes, which they pursue throughout the duration of the film.

Writing, when it happens, happens around the object of its obsession. It circumvents it. On purpose. Delays the satisfaction of meeting it head on, touching it, so to speak. It is built on accidents. No matter how strategic the writing, no matter how planned, the accident is writing’s most internal structure. It governs it. Effects, at almost every turn, its behavior. Writing requires space. But not necessarily physical space but a space that dissociates it from the real, which is always available and which always crashes its way onto the space of writing.

If writing is the most prevalent visible marker around which we orient ourselves, how do we find our way? How does the syntax of space, the space of writing, determine the spatial integration of location, of where we are? Is it only the number of changes in direction in the logic of narrative that enables us to predict where we will gather at a single moment? Have we overestimated the distance we have traveled having made so many changes in direction? Where are we going?