The river
where you set
your foot just now
is gone--
those waters
giving way to this,
now this.
Heraclitus
(translated by Brooks Haxton)
December 28, 2008
December 27, 2008
For what is, is in contact with what is, Always looking to the beams of the sun
Parmenides
On Nature
PROLOGUE (1) The car that bears me carried me as far as ever my heart desired, when it had brought me and set me on the renowned way of the goddess, which leads the man who knows through all the towns. On that way was I borne along; for on it did the wise steeds carry me, drawing my car, and maidens showed the way. And the axle, glowing in the socket—for it was urged round by the whirling wheels at each end—gave forth a sound as of a pipe, when the daughters of the Sun, hasting to convey me into the light, threw back their veils from off their faces and left the abode of Night. There are the gates of the ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and Avenging Justice keeps the keys that fit them. Her did the maidens entreat with gentle words and cunningly persuade to unfasten without demur the bolted bars from the gates. Then, when the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide opening, when their brazen posts fitted with rivets and nails swung back one after the other. Straight through them, on the broad way, did the maidens guide the horses and the car, and the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spake to me these words: Welcome, O youth, that comest to my abode on the car that bears thee tended by immortal charioteers! It is no ill chance, but right and justice that has sent thee forth to travel on this way. Far, indeed, does it lie from the beaten track of men! Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none the less shalt thou learn these things also,—how passing right through all things one should judge the things that seem to be. But do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry, nor let habit by its much experience force thee to cast upon this way a wandering eye or sounding ear or tongue; but judge by argument1 the much disputed proof uttered by me. There is only one way left that can be spoken of…
THE WAY OF TRUTH
(2) Look steadfastly with thy mind at things though afar as if they were at hand. Thou canst not cut off what is from holding fast to what is, neither scattering itself abroad in order nor coming together.
(3) It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back again there.
(4, 5) Come now, I will tell thee—and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away—the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be,—that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not —that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.
(6) It needs must be that what can be spoken and thought is; for it is possible for it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. This is what I bid thee ponder. I hold thee back from this first way of inquiry, and from this other also, upon which mortals knowing naught wander two-faced; for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts, so that they are borne along stupefied like men deaf and blind. Undiscerning crowds, who hold that it is and is not the same and not the same, and all things travel in opposite directions!
(7) For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are; and do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry.
(8) One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what kind of origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase? ... I shall not let thee say nor think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. And, if it came from nothing, what need could have made it arise later rather than sooner? Therefore must it either be altogether or be not at all. Nor will the force of truth suffer aught to arise besides itself from that which is not. Wherefore, justice doth not loose her fetters and let anything come into being or pass away, but holds it fast. Our judgment thereon depends on this: "Is it or is it not?" Surely it is adjudged, as it needs must be, that we are to set aside the one way as unthinkable and nameless (for it is no true way), and that the other path is real and true. How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is. Moreover, it is immovable in the bonds of mighty chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them away. It is the same, and it rests in the self-same place, abiding in itself. And thus it remaineth constant in its place; for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit that holds it fast on every side. Wherefore it is not permitted to what is to be infinite; for it is in need of nothing; while, if it were infinite, it would stand in need of everything. The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered. And there is not, and never shall be, anything besides what is, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true—coming into being and passing away, being and not being, change of place and alteration of bright colour. Since, then, it has a furthest limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every direction; for it cannot be greater or smaller in one place than in another. For there is no nothing that could keep it from reaching out equally, nor can aught that is be more here and less there than what is, since it is all inviolable. For the point from which it is equal in every direction tends equally to the limits.
THE WAY OF BELIEF
Here shall I close my trustworthy speech and thought about the truth. Henceforward learn the beliefs of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words. Mortals have made up their minds to name two forms, one of which they should not name, and that is where they go astray from the truth. They have distinguished them as opposite in form, and have assigned to them marks distinct from one another. To the one they allot the fire of heaven, gentle, very light, in every direction the same as itself, but not the same as the other. The other is just the opposite to it, dark night, a compact and heavy body. Of these I tell thee the whole arrangement as it seems likely; for so no thought of mortals will ever outstrip thee.
(9) Now that all things have been named light and night, and the names which belong to the power of each have been assigned to these things and to those, everything is full at once of light and dark night, both equal, since neither has aught to do with the other.
(10, 11) And thou shalt know the substance of the sky, and all the signs in the sky, and the resplendent works of the glowing sun's pure torch, and whence they arose. And thou shalt learn likewise of the wandering deeds of the round-faced moon, and of her substance. Thou shalt know, too, the heavens that surround us, whence they arose, and how Necessity took them and bound them to keep the limits of the stars . . . how the earth, and the sun, and the moon, and the sky that is common to all, and the Milky Way, and the outermost Olympos, and the burning might of the stars arose.
(12) The narrower bands were filled with unmixed fire, and those next them with night, and in the midst of these rushes their portion of fire. In the midst of these is the divinity that directs the course of all things; for she is the beginner of all painful birth and all begetting, driving the female to the embrace of the male, and the male to that of the female.
(13) First of all the gods she contrived Eros.
(14) Shining by night with borrowed light, wandering round the earth.
(15) Always looking to the beams of the sun.
(16) For just as thought stands at any time to the mixture of its erring organs, so does it come to men; for that which thinks is the same, namely, the substance of the limbs, in each and every man; for their thought is that of which there is more in them.
(17) On the right boys; on the left girls.
(19) Thus, according to men's opinions, did things come into being, and thus they are now. In time they will grow up and pass away. To each of these things men have assigned a fixed name.
On Nature
PROLOGUE (1) The car that bears me carried me as far as ever my heart desired, when it had brought me and set me on the renowned way of the goddess, which leads the man who knows through all the towns. On that way was I borne along; for on it did the wise steeds carry me, drawing my car, and maidens showed the way. And the axle, glowing in the socket—for it was urged round by the whirling wheels at each end—gave forth a sound as of a pipe, when the daughters of the Sun, hasting to convey me into the light, threw back their veils from off their faces and left the abode of Night. There are the gates of the ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and Avenging Justice keeps the keys that fit them. Her did the maidens entreat with gentle words and cunningly persuade to unfasten without demur the bolted bars from the gates. Then, when the doors were thrown back, they disclosed a wide opening, when their brazen posts fitted with rivets and nails swung back one after the other. Straight through them, on the broad way, did the maidens guide the horses and the car, and the goddess greeted me kindly, and took my right hand in hers, and spake to me these words: Welcome, O youth, that comest to my abode on the car that bears thee tended by immortal charioteers! It is no ill chance, but right and justice that has sent thee forth to travel on this way. Far, indeed, does it lie from the beaten track of men! Meet it is that thou shouldst learn all things, as well the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth, as the opinions of mortals in which is no true belief at all. Yet none the less shalt thou learn these things also,—how passing right through all things one should judge the things that seem to be. But do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry, nor let habit by its much experience force thee to cast upon this way a wandering eye or sounding ear or tongue; but judge by argument1 the much disputed proof uttered by me. There is only one way left that can be spoken of…
THE WAY OF TRUTH
(2) Look steadfastly with thy mind at things though afar as if they were at hand. Thou canst not cut off what is from holding fast to what is, neither scattering itself abroad in order nor coming together.
(3) It is all one to me where I begin; for I shall come back again there.
(4, 5) Come now, I will tell thee—and do thou hearken to my saying and carry it away—the only two ways of search that can be thought of. The first, namely, that It is, and that it is impossible for it not to be, is the way of belief, for truth is its companion. The other, namely, that It is not, and that it must needs not be,—that, I tell thee, is a path that none can learn of at all. For thou canst not know what is not —that is impossible—nor utter it; for it is the same thing that can be thought and that can be.
(6) It needs must be that what can be spoken and thought is; for it is possible for it to be, and it is not possible for what is nothing to be. This is what I bid thee ponder. I hold thee back from this first way of inquiry, and from this other also, upon which mortals knowing naught wander two-faced; for helplessness guides the wandering thought in their breasts, so that they are borne along stupefied like men deaf and blind. Undiscerning crowds, who hold that it is and is not the same and not the same, and all things travel in opposite directions!
(7) For this shall never be proved, that the things that are not are; and do thou restrain thy thought from this way of inquiry.
(8) One path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is. In this path are very many tokens that what is is uncreated and indestructible; for it is complete, immovable, and without end. Nor was it ever, nor will it be; for now it is, all at once, a continuous one. For what kind of origin for it wilt thou look for? In what way and from what source could it have drawn its increase? ... I shall not let thee say nor think that it came from what is not; for it can neither be thought nor uttered that anything is not. And, if it came from nothing, what need could have made it arise later rather than sooner? Therefore must it either be altogether or be not at all. Nor will the force of truth suffer aught to arise besides itself from that which is not. Wherefore, justice doth not loose her fetters and let anything come into being or pass away, but holds it fast. Our judgment thereon depends on this: "Is it or is it not?" Surely it is adjudged, as it needs must be, that we are to set aside the one way as unthinkable and nameless (for it is no true way), and that the other path is real and true. How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor is it if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of. Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike, and there is no more of it in one place than in another, to hinder it from holding together, nor less of it, but everything is full of what is. Wherefore it is wholly continuous; for what is, is in contact with what is. Moreover, it is immovable in the bonds of mighty chains, without beginning and without end; since coming into being and passing away have been driven afar, and true belief has cast them away. It is the same, and it rests in the self-same place, abiding in itself. And thus it remaineth constant in its place; for hard necessity keeps it in the bonds of the limit that holds it fast on every side. Wherefore it is not permitted to what is to be infinite; for it is in need of nothing; while, if it were infinite, it would stand in need of everything. The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered. And there is not, and never shall be, anything besides what is, since fate has chained it so as to be whole and immovable. Wherefore all these things are but names which mortals have given, believing them to be true—coming into being and passing away, being and not being, change of place and alteration of bright colour. Since, then, it has a furthest limit, it is complete on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, equally poised from the centre in every direction; for it cannot be greater or smaller in one place than in another. For there is no nothing that could keep it from reaching out equally, nor can aught that is be more here and less there than what is, since it is all inviolable. For the point from which it is equal in every direction tends equally to the limits.
THE WAY OF BELIEF
Here shall I close my trustworthy speech and thought about the truth. Henceforward learn the beliefs of mortals, giving ear to the deceptive ordering of my words. Mortals have made up their minds to name two forms, one of which they should not name, and that is where they go astray from the truth. They have distinguished them as opposite in form, and have assigned to them marks distinct from one another. To the one they allot the fire of heaven, gentle, very light, in every direction the same as itself, but not the same as the other. The other is just the opposite to it, dark night, a compact and heavy body. Of these I tell thee the whole arrangement as it seems likely; for so no thought of mortals will ever outstrip thee.
(9) Now that all things have been named light and night, and the names which belong to the power of each have been assigned to these things and to those, everything is full at once of light and dark night, both equal, since neither has aught to do with the other.
(10, 11) And thou shalt know the substance of the sky, and all the signs in the sky, and the resplendent works of the glowing sun's pure torch, and whence they arose. And thou shalt learn likewise of the wandering deeds of the round-faced moon, and of her substance. Thou shalt know, too, the heavens that surround us, whence they arose, and how Necessity took them and bound them to keep the limits of the stars . . . how the earth, and the sun, and the moon, and the sky that is common to all, and the Milky Way, and the outermost Olympos, and the burning might of the stars arose.
(12) The narrower bands were filled with unmixed fire, and those next them with night, and in the midst of these rushes their portion of fire. In the midst of these is the divinity that directs the course of all things; for she is the beginner of all painful birth and all begetting, driving the female to the embrace of the male, and the male to that of the female.
(13) First of all the gods she contrived Eros.
(14) Shining by night with borrowed light, wandering round the earth.
(15) Always looking to the beams of the sun.
(16) For just as thought stands at any time to the mixture of its erring organs, so does it come to men; for that which thinks is the same, namely, the substance of the limbs, in each and every man; for their thought is that of which there is more in them.
(17) On the right boys; on the left girls.
(19) Thus, according to men's opinions, did things come into being, and thus they are now. In time they will grow up and pass away. To each of these things men have assigned a fixed name.
December 9, 2008
December 8, 2008
When you & I were young
When you & I were young
we would press our white faces from the car
& the rain on the windows would run through the gathering
dark
& the lampposts shone & dogs would run into the dying
frame
where the park was glowing dimly through the silence of the
lanes
& the radiators hum rose above the falling leaves
where so fragile & so young you had drifted into sleep
I've been for a walk
& every face I see seems to be mine
night-time comes
the birds have flown
a fever glows in every line
I love this season
this weary night
the flint the dreams the silent pines
the eeriness
is in the feeling
that I have finished everything
& a chill from the school was running back to her car
& her white face cried she was deaf & afraid of the dark
& the whispering house grew still as we stared into the night
in the garden & the lamps & the window's fading light
& though Christmas was the same, we had seen another
year
turning softly through the flames
Alasdair MacLean
we would press our white faces from the car
& the rain on the windows would run through the gathering
dark
& the lampposts shone & dogs would run into the dying
frame
where the park was glowing dimly through the silence of the
lanes
& the radiators hum rose above the falling leaves
where so fragile & so young you had drifted into sleep
I've been for a walk
& every face I see seems to be mine
night-time comes
the birds have flown
a fever glows in every line
I love this season
this weary night
the flint the dreams the silent pines
the eeriness
is in the feeling
that I have finished everything
& a chill from the school was running back to her car
& her white face cried she was deaf & afraid of the dark
& the whispering house grew still as we stared into the night
in the garden & the lamps & the window's fading light
& though Christmas was the same, we had seen another
year
turning softly through the flames
Alasdair MacLean
December 7, 2008
December 6, 2008
The Hour
This is the violet hour, the hour of hush and wonder, when the affections glow again and valor is reborn, when the shadows deepen magically along the edge of the forest and we believe that, if we watch carefully, at any moment we may see the unicorn.
- Bernard DeVoto "The Hour"
- Bernard DeVoto "The Hour"
October 31, 2008
Philonious
"The feeble narrow sense cannot descry innumerable worlds revolving around central fires; and in those worlds, nor imagination are big enough to comprehend the boundless extent, with all its glittering furniture. Though the labouring mind exert and strain each power to its utmost reach, there still stands out ungrasped a surplusage immeasurable. Yet all the vast bodies that compose this mighty frame, how distant and remote soever, are by some secret mechanism, some Divine art and force, linked in a mutual dependence and intercourse with eachother, even with this earth, which was almost slipt from my thoughts and lost in the crowd of worlds. Is not the whole system immense, beautiful, glorious beyond expression and beyond thought!"
-George Berkeley, from The Second Dialogue Between Hylas and Philonious
-George Berkeley, from The Second Dialogue Between Hylas and Philonious
October 26, 2008
October 17, 2008
Hylas
Hylas
single mindedly
words
this
wind
geometry of sensations
sensations of geometry
geometry of self
sensations of self
self geometry
words of which are
all
mindedly this
singular
for
single mindedly
words
this
wind
geometry of sensations
sensations of geometry
geometry of self
sensations of self
self geometry
words of which are
all
mindedly this
singular
for
October 3, 2008
The Instant
The Instant
Where are the centuries, where is the dream
of sword-strife that the Tartars entertained,
where are the massive ramparts that they flattened?
Where is the wood of the Cross, the Tree of Adam?
The present is singular. It is memory
that sets up time. Both succession and error
come with the routine of the clock. A year
is no less vanity than is history.
Between dawn and nightfall is an abyss
of agonies, felicites, and cares.
The face that looks back from wasted mirrors,
the mirrors of night, is not the same face.
The fleeting day is frail and is eternal;
expect no other Heaven, no other Hell.
Jorges Luis Borges
El Instante
Dónde estarán los siglos, dónde el sueño
de espadas que los tártaros soñaron,
dónde los fuertes muros que allanaron,
dónde el Árbol de Adán y el otro Leño?
El presente está solo. La memoria
erige el tiempo. Sucesión y engaño
es la rutina del reloj. El año
no es menos vano que la vana historia.
Entre el alba y la noche hay un abismo
de agonías, de luces, de cuidados;
el rostro que se mira en los gastados
espejos de la noche no es el mismo.
El hoy fugaz es tenue y es eterno;
otro Cielo no esperes, ni otro Infierno.
Where are the centuries, where is the dream
of sword-strife that the Tartars entertained,
where are the massive ramparts that they flattened?
Where is the wood of the Cross, the Tree of Adam?
The present is singular. It is memory
that sets up time. Both succession and error
come with the routine of the clock. A year
is no less vanity than is history.
Between dawn and nightfall is an abyss
of agonies, felicites, and cares.
The face that looks back from wasted mirrors,
the mirrors of night, is not the same face.
The fleeting day is frail and is eternal;
expect no other Heaven, no other Hell.
Jorges Luis Borges
El Instante
Dónde estarán los siglos, dónde el sueño
de espadas que los tártaros soñaron,
dónde los fuertes muros que allanaron,
dónde el Árbol de Adán y el otro Leño?
El presente está solo. La memoria
erige el tiempo. Sucesión y engaño
es la rutina del reloj. El año
no es menos vano que la vana historia.
Entre el alba y la noche hay un abismo
de agonías, de luces, de cuidados;
el rostro que se mira en los gastados
espejos de la noche no es el mismo.
El hoy fugaz es tenue y es eterno;
otro Cielo no esperes, ni otro Infierno.
August 26, 2008
August 20, 2008
August 18, 2008
A Ghost Story
The case of periodic, infinite systems, a translation movement is allowed. In particular, axis can become helicoidal
August 12, 2008
August 10, 2008
"Ghost of Central Avenue" Appears 2d Time in Week; Youth, 16, Leaps From Window, Half-Brother Screams as "Little Girl" Walks Through Wall
from The Cincinnati Post, Sept. 5, 1941
Many Say They Saw Ghost, But None Can Explain It; Central Avenue Residents Report Viewing Tiny Fair-haired Apparition.
from The Cincinnati Times Star, Sept. 5, 1941, 15:2
"Ghost" Said To Be Cutting Capers in Over-the-Rhine Tenement.
from The Cincinnati Enquirer, Aug. 20, 1902, 12:4
Dog-Gone Spooky! Carthage Plant Guards Keep On Seeing Eerie Figure and Canine In Fadeaway Act
from The Cincinnati Enquirer August 5, 1948, 8:1
A Strange Story - A Messenger from the Celestial Regions - A Stone Falls to the Ground with Characters Engraved Upon It
from The Cincinnati Commercial Tribune Oct 30, 1865, 8:1
June 3, 2008
The room with oriental furniture
He watched the atoms go "blip blip blip" across the room scattered with oriental furniture. Kneeling on his bed they increased with every page he turned. "Are you going to kill me now?" the other asked. He remembered the neighbors, fated to drive off the cliff at the end of their driveway and tumble headlong into the swirling river below, a swift erosion of flesh, metal, and sandstone.
The stairs were slick with moss, a clinging penumbra wet against the worn stone steps cut into the side of the hill. Campers crawled up and down its steep incline, ants preparing for and recovering from the long hike. The river was at flood stage and the governor had decreed the area off limits until the waters receeded. I was staying at a friend's house and we had obtained a special research permit which would allow us access to the river. We eventually crossed the last line of trees and the warm muddy water crept up our ankles. We saw with our gear for some time, all the while documenting information and taking photographs. After we had exhausted the geography, we began to study the wildlife. Feet dangling with infinte depths beneath us and water up to our necks, the current carried us swiftly along and it became a struggle to remain together. I pulled up a tiny red fish. "Look how it loves for its mouth to be held open between my thumb and forefinger!" The creature was plump and deep red with orange flecks. It dropped back into the water. "Of course you heard what happened last month?" "No I'm afraid not," I said. "It was Jane Goodall herself, and her cronies," he continued, "they found an underwater den of Fluorescent Lascer-Worms!" A hush followed. "They barely made it out alive. One of her research assistants never regained consciousness." We all looked at eachother. "Did you feel that?" Something smoothe and itchy brushed my thigh. Then my shoulder and belly. It rippled over my skin and atop my calf. Our arms flailed madly as we swam against the current towards safety. On the shore my companions examined themselves, amazed to find no stings. Where I had felt the itching I noticed subtle red marks. I kept this to myself. We were back in the apartment making rice krispy treats when the others saw them. I looked down and saw glowing fluorescent lascerations all over my body.
He chased me into the underground church that had been under construction for hundreds of years, and the underground library. I hid in the bells but he found me. In the atrium of glass walls I climbed a rope ladder past the offices which I could see, stacked on top of eachother, on the other side of the glass. I ran down a hallway I had never seen before. A door opened and I was in the neighbors apartment. He had been waiting for me. We watched eather, circling the room like two boxers before a prize fight. I opened the chifarobe and pulled out a book. The atoms, neutrinos, and protons blipped across the room scattered with oriental furniture. Was the sun exploding? Was he about to kill me? I thought about the neighbors driving off the edge of the cliff again, their vehicle tumbling headlong into space. The abyss waited. A twisting blue thread below, the river was at flood stage. Their bodies were disolved. I wondered if they felt any pain or if falling through space was an eternity of euphoria followed by a crash of nothing. There would be no evidence of the body, so why would there be pain? For all I knew the atoms that made up their bodies were now blipping across the room full of oriental furniture. I wondered if he would kill me. He put down his book as his fingers tightened around the knife. A neutrino sailed across the room full of oriental furniture.
The stairs were slick with moss, a clinging penumbra wet against the worn stone steps cut into the side of the hill. Campers crawled up and down its steep incline, ants preparing for and recovering from the long hike. The river was at flood stage and the governor had decreed the area off limits until the waters receeded. I was staying at a friend's house and we had obtained a special research permit which would allow us access to the river. We eventually crossed the last line of trees and the warm muddy water crept up our ankles. We saw with our gear for some time, all the while documenting information and taking photographs. After we had exhausted the geography, we began to study the wildlife. Feet dangling with infinte depths beneath us and water up to our necks, the current carried us swiftly along and it became a struggle to remain together. I pulled up a tiny red fish. "Look how it loves for its mouth to be held open between my thumb and forefinger!" The creature was plump and deep red with orange flecks. It dropped back into the water. "Of course you heard what happened last month?" "No I'm afraid not," I said. "It was Jane Goodall herself, and her cronies," he continued, "they found an underwater den of Fluorescent Lascer-Worms!" A hush followed. "They barely made it out alive. One of her research assistants never regained consciousness." We all looked at eachother. "Did you feel that?" Something smoothe and itchy brushed my thigh. Then my shoulder and belly. It rippled over my skin and atop my calf. Our arms flailed madly as we swam against the current towards safety. On the shore my companions examined themselves, amazed to find no stings. Where I had felt the itching I noticed subtle red marks. I kept this to myself. We were back in the apartment making rice krispy treats when the others saw them. I looked down and saw glowing fluorescent lascerations all over my body.
He chased me into the underground church that had been under construction for hundreds of years, and the underground library. I hid in the bells but he found me. In the atrium of glass walls I climbed a rope ladder past the offices which I could see, stacked on top of eachother, on the other side of the glass. I ran down a hallway I had never seen before. A door opened and I was in the neighbors apartment. He had been waiting for me. We watched eather, circling the room like two boxers before a prize fight. I opened the chifarobe and pulled out a book. The atoms, neutrinos, and protons blipped across the room scattered with oriental furniture. Was the sun exploding? Was he about to kill me? I thought about the neighbors driving off the edge of the cliff again, their vehicle tumbling headlong into space. The abyss waited. A twisting blue thread below, the river was at flood stage. Their bodies were disolved. I wondered if they felt any pain or if falling through space was an eternity of euphoria followed by a crash of nothing. There would be no evidence of the body, so why would there be pain? For all I knew the atoms that made up their bodies were now blipping across the room full of oriental furniture. I wondered if he would kill me. He put down his book as his fingers tightened around the knife. A neutrino sailed across the room full of oriental furniture.
January 21, 2008
The Return
The Return
Joe Bousquet
I.
It was as though her eyes sought out their secrets by entering my own. So young was she, our kisses opened directly onto fairytales she made up. But it is not to try to see her again that I have returned to this place.
Whenever I gazed upon her, or she turned her smile up to me, my soul seemed to hover in the space between us. The roses in the garden would float up out of their sleep, reflecting the horizons' unmade heart across my giddiness; and the furthermost silence brought back my dreams to life. The whole universe was placed between me and my heart. Happiness could gaze upon us, and yet our eyes had no way of bringing it any closer.
I was away for but a few months. The selfsame dance whose refrain is now on my lips comes back in every heart on a Sunday, ceaselessly offering up, between the wilting plane-tree, its mirror of pure water to the stars. Once music has recaptured the lost necklaces of every girl in love, once silence has crept back out of the silence, shall I find my way again without having to ask whom it is I have forgotten?
Already everything is so remote that her name alone encompasses my entire youth.
That name quivers in my voice, too trivial to forget, that child's name with its hint of silence, which stares deep into my heart, prompting recollection...
Until such time as the oars bury that song which mocks me with its tale of a final evening on the highway where our folk like to dance, the highway of farewells.
I was aware of an infinite depth about the way she spoke, as she counted off for me the dates of some distant year, without thinking, one arm about my neck; her poor face seemed to abstract itself from my wayward awareness, hiding away in my eyes as if to escape my icy heart. I would ask myself, what kind of shadow is it that seems to weep alongside those words she comes out with, whenever she stares at me? The spectre of my life! I watched in disgust as the spectre grew larger, edging up closer to me in its wildness...
In the villages they tend to stay up late dancing, on the feast day of the crazy. I recall that I used to slip away unnoticed, for I was already well lost before I actually left. That strange hour in which I pondered my rebellion has crept back tonight to make my voice embrace itself. A dense fog comes drifting through the trees. The roses raise up the slumbers of the earth in their spiky veils. On this searing night of truth, I could hear my pain steal my life, which had hitherto lain safe in its enchanted depths.
When I reached the end of a path chosen quite by chance, the first thing I noticed was that the wind had changed direction and was now sweeping what seemed like dead leaves from bygone years, piling them up at my feet. I bent down and touched the grass along the slopes. Taken aback by the whispering of familiar haunts, I suddenly imagined my body might be a cloak for their secret.
I think I must already have been singing. My voice stole back my soul from the gods... Oh, that sweet minute plucked from the past and secreted within the hour of my return! With each step, the paths that lay behind me had been closed off. My life turns into its own song, indistinguishable from the dusk. Death assigns us a name, surprised by our yearning for a pure space which has been betrayed: it is like a woman in love who steals away through the dementia of the rose-bushes.
The winds of time go begging, plundering... The soul of nightfall had merged into the indifference on the face of things. And there was I, staring at myself, all sense of direction lost... A man, a poor countenance in which everything disowns itself. The awkward mistruth of a shadow. I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky.
A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss. Then came the moment when the evening star draws the pastures open. The desert of my gaze casts light across the slopes. Weightless, the night trembled amid the drifting reeds, cradling the vines at my feet and the almond trees across which rode the dark winds.
The branches, the pathway, like a young girl's fetching smile, tore the veil from my heart, unfurling the immensity in my eyes. Each leaf borne off by autumn attracted a look, a cry of pain, from the untamed air. I trod stealthily on, gradually more aware of the marvellous pain I was suffering.
II.
How quickly passers-by move on! There must be a celebration somewhere. No body troubles to look at my face. I feel as if the thoughts of other people were trying to steal up my eyes.
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks. In a song's fading, my name is erased, amid the blossoms of windswept beauties. Is it really the love in my eyes which restores to life the tamarisks, the rooftops, the roses, when everything on which I look escapes from me into my eyes? In vain the beauty of the sunset draws tenderness about itself... Its universe could only describe itself by casting me out of my dream; and I know there is no one waiting for me, anywhere. The whole secret of the path I am following lies in the things I leave behind me forever.
Through the deafness of the night, the village risks sending out the same covert flame. Each voice has lapsed into the all-encompassing silence: its astonishing sweetness persudades me I should return to the petalled shadows of the farmhouses; where branches bearing lovely smiles float back from afar to merge into my dreams; across the slopes whose secret my heart is learning by heart.
Across my dreamy legends, a fragile hoeland reaches out to its exiled lilies. Skylines, shorelines, caresses, the countryside where I was born was fashioned by my heart and my eyes, as they swept across the fields, the daylight and all those hamlets, more mysterious still.
That murmuring in which the light hid from itself, those smells, that trickle of voices came drifting downwards from the sky, which my emotion sawi n rainbow colours, tracing its salts in the cycle of its seasons. An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassing the existance of the slightest human echo. I knew I could identify it in whatever direction I looked, since it would pluck the same fruit for my eyes from the least obvious horizons; and then a smile waylaid that nostalgia wherein my childhood races after me. As if taking its bearing from my own, a woman's life offered the promise of fresh spaces to my infinite desire never to die.
And once the sweet ray of light had split apart amid flashes of bright flesh, my eyes could trace the shadows of desire upon a hidden countenance.
The laughter of young girls was incapable of describing happiness.
Love lay over their beauty like a summer's dawn upon sleeping eyes. The dance, with all its reminiscences of love, had stored its silver heart among the stars.
Nights of fire where flowers would crowd in, bringing silence. Eyes which would invent the time of year, within that blinding purple clash of atmospheres in which life disputed its own rights... When one is too close to daybreak, which erases all things, one has no idea how to wait, one doesn't even realise that one is waiting.
Hands blindly following their caresses! ... They conversed in low tones. Each name died away in my wayfarer's song, and the secret of that loveliest languate of all was lost forever.
It is in my heart that oblivion holds sway over tyhe eyes of those women who are no longer with us. I couldn't even work out how to ask which way to go.
III.
Why did life never identify its own reflection in my eyes? Everything on which I gazed had already abandoned me for good; thus it was that happiness passed me over, in songs, in farewells... It was the wind over the tombstones which nullified our words as we paused at the edge of everything, distanced even from ourselves, with the world opening its eyes anew in my dream.
Saddest of loves in which we were being dreamt by someone remote whom I could not trace and in whose shadow the memory of that evening comes back to me. Happiness has only ever been betrayed by its own shadow. . . Rocky hollow, thatched cottage or rat's nest, this is where you'll find bitterness, this is the summit at which the wanderer realises that what he has been seeking has meanwhile taken on the aspect of everything he has been trying to disown, and wonders if he might be on the verge of dying. Never again shall my sandals leave prints along the ruts. Never again shall children point me out in my black jacket or my corduroy trousers at the crossroads where I used to ask my way.
I cannot distinguish the road back from my own shadow. Oh, beauty of this evening which my heart makes even purer than the sky, where the stars pick out their partners, stealing me back from those who have given up waiting for me; its darkest song has reached its climax in my suffering.
. . . Wrapped within her smile, she brought me such bliss, and her child's gaiety was nourished by my life.
When her graceful eyes had reunited us in that great flight of evening, the stammerings of love sought the shadows of our lips, as each avowal, exposing the nakedness of the soul, brought our thoughts closer to silence, expiring once it had voiced its secret.
Her smile was a naked dream. It was her purity that made my soul visible; while I could just make out a slight heartbeat, offering little resistance to me at the black core of the abyss and repeating, each time more softly, the name she had given me in the act of love.
Such at least are the thoughts in which a former life is laid bare, the gold gleaming at the bottom of the goblet too heavy to lift up. For in that time of youth, the dream of love would float on a sombre stream, which recollection has now drunk dry. How strange it all is! The trees of a separate highway trembled in the background of our impatience. Did her forehead bow down to obey the forehead of that evening which once more I see in my dreams? It was as though she had sought through me to be free of her own reality.
And her smile, telling me that space has been found anew.
.........
Her smile has chosen its giddy path within my eyes. And truly she is there. Her look draws out my secrets from within the mystery of the stars.
In that far place she had a name, Anne or Marion, I can no longer be sure. Was she pretty? Her features memorised my childhood, and made my whole life transparent.
That face wherein I felt invoked, I confess to myself in a low voice that it had circled about my entire existence.
Ah! Then my every thought was synonymous with her life. She was always daydreaming, and I recall how her slightest smile would cut short her gaze. An unreal sadness loomed over her beauty.
In a single smile, she would confide the secret of her tears to my loving gaze.
The whole miraculous structure of her life was founded upon my own.
I would stare at her as though through a glimmering dawn: it was the purity of my own life which I was drinking from her eyes.
Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow; and all my flesh was aware of black pathways and hovels and the silence one observes when the dead are near.
In the half-dark where her memory pursued me, voices fell silent beneath the clouds at my heels; the same fire shines through everyone else's eyes, and they all seem to wait to hear love spoken.
It is beneath such candles that the song is taken up again: there was once a girl who danced so much she lost her heart. Her mouth was fed on smiles alone. . .
The loveliest of the stars has raised up the night so as to blind me with its infinite presence; my gaze is submerged, like a silver ring tossed into the flood of my heart.
IV.
These new silences run so deep that I know my being must have changed its secrets.
I have thrown away the tiny lamp which cast a shadow as long as my entire journey. What might I not rediscover if I am now to be lost?
A ringing sound rises up from the links of chains slipped by the night. Now other words, words of the tenderest kind, slip reluctantly down from hair that is loosed. A path is quickly beaten across the rubble of the prison.
The rose of risk blossoms within my flesh, unfettered from my shadow: a single life has enfolded each gaze and all the silence within its wings.
The world soars up anew, illumined in a silken giddiness, and only the sky remains to bear witness to its artifice. Harbouring deep colours, a hand, raised over the very air I am breathing, dies as it persuades me to stay alive.
This is surely no time to try to track myself down to the place where I am standing. So that I may be free of this body which the earth insists on taking back, the sky, the sky in all its lightness, has absorbed me within the sweetness of belief.
The bulrush of love might point towards a shadow, were it to move. Mistakenly, some absence or other reverberates in the hidden depths of my vague tenderness. . .
My gaze is reborn from its shadows and steals across the plane-trees, the balcony and the year's array of flowers, whose profound truth has found me out at last. The same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. This is the land where everything depends on my life, where the one thing to inhibit love would be an excess of love.
A new world, capable of surprising me, a world in which every being can know itself and find its apotheosis in my desires. . . Caught up in their own brightness, the silvery plane-trees become marvelous visions in the night. . . In all those places which on enourished my thoughts, I see tears welling up in colourless eyes as they dream about my life. . .
. . .She has no idea at all how to make herself known. The delicacy of her approach is enough to dispel all hint of a storm. The translucency of those glances which her presence sets alight for me is like a candle wherein life caresses its eyes and selects its zephyr, reviving all those beauties in which my naked soul revealed itself to chance. . .
. . .Kisses, pink and various, and then faces.
Here is the age old dream of a gaze in which the spirit can drink itself in, absolving the daylight from its allegiance to my shadows, carry off the arc of my madness towards an iris no one can foresee.
Something like trepidation tells me there mustexist more light within the silence of things, within the fear of seeing my life's stagnancy disfigure those awakenings as they multiply about me; and I allow myself to be borne away on the winds towards those overflows where love tries to construct some sort of protection for itself. For in between my glances the winds traverse a landscape erased by the dazzling impulse of the flesh, across heather where I read the message of defenceless eyes.
Once there was a face in which the depths of my life were blown away, a face whose smile penetrated me deeper than my own dream.
Whereupon our eyes, true to their sky-blue hue, cast shadows across time.
Myosotis of the look, probing for sunlight in the crevices of time. Yes, I remember my youth. Inside my life, there was always a secondary life hidden away. A brother would peer into my happiness, with a benevolent eye.
His hands drew closer to my heart those unreal fields where love uncovers its chalice. He gazes on life, on the grass in the graveyards, on love as it fades. An hour's brightness floats between us, swollen like a tear about to fall.
The floodwater uncovers the heart of the last of the mermaids. In vain the wind invokes its departed spirits, predicting the death of all things that breathe and shine. My entire happiness is tied up inside my child's apron, and as I walk I shall turn to look back over my shadow's dream.
My cries are like the residue of blood that lingers in a deep wound. The sounds breathe, then die away. An enormous bowl of silence has been filled to the brim.
The world is like some alternative dream in which a heart falls apart; a dream in which the sky closes down its lid upon the secret of all things we love. I can make out the tracks, the darkening mountainside, even the shape of bodies, as lovely as oblivion, that rivulet in which the blue sky looks for solace. And still that same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. Upon the eroded cliffs where I come to my senses, my steps gather up the shadow as it pours down from the sky.
Tonight, the thoughts of the dead are turning back to the earth. I manage to open my eyes again without forfeiting my heart. The trees and the grass at dusk intoxicate my thoughts, inciting them to slip back into the shadow in its natural state.
My soul pares itself at the centre of this nocturnal landscape. Wretched spirit, in thrall to all those lightning flashes, the utter blackness of the sky has paid off your ransom tonight.
Listen, through the composure of the olive trees, a tiny river can be seen: everything it says is addressed to the stars. Through the lattices, the very roses intensify the darkness. If you, the living, were to weep, your ears would strip me of everything.
The necklaces of your eyes describe the distant outline of those windswept villages. Here, complaints may only be voiced in a low murmur. A sad brother would read out what happiness meant. His heart has taken on all my suffering. I would weep softly were he to speak to me about myself.
But it is she whom he best remembers. Ann, or Marion - I forget which name linked her to life on this earth, where her laughter drew together the crowns of all the gods I have ever worshipped. And now her face is heavy with my secret.
I gaze upon her and sense that my life now can go no further. A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything
*****
First published in Chantiers between January and March 1928.
Reprinted in Joe Bousquet: Oevre romanesque complete, Vol. 1.
French original copyright Albim Michel, 1979
Translated by Roger Cardinal.
Joe Bousquet
I.
It was as though her eyes sought out their secrets by entering my own. So young was she, our kisses opened directly onto fairytales she made up. But it is not to try to see her again that I have returned to this place.
Whenever I gazed upon her, or she turned her smile up to me, my soul seemed to hover in the space between us. The roses in the garden would float up out of their sleep, reflecting the horizons' unmade heart across my giddiness; and the furthermost silence brought back my dreams to life. The whole universe was placed between me and my heart. Happiness could gaze upon us, and yet our eyes had no way of bringing it any closer.
I was away for but a few months. The selfsame dance whose refrain is now on my lips comes back in every heart on a Sunday, ceaselessly offering up, between the wilting plane-tree, its mirror of pure water to the stars. Once music has recaptured the lost necklaces of every girl in love, once silence has crept back out of the silence, shall I find my way again without having to ask whom it is I have forgotten?
Already everything is so remote that her name alone encompasses my entire youth.
That name quivers in my voice, too trivial to forget, that child's name with its hint of silence, which stares deep into my heart, prompting recollection...
Until such time as the oars bury that song which mocks me with its tale of a final evening on the highway where our folk like to dance, the highway of farewells.
I was aware of an infinite depth about the way she spoke, as she counted off for me the dates of some distant year, without thinking, one arm about my neck; her poor face seemed to abstract itself from my wayward awareness, hiding away in my eyes as if to escape my icy heart. I would ask myself, what kind of shadow is it that seems to weep alongside those words she comes out with, whenever she stares at me? The spectre of my life! I watched in disgust as the spectre grew larger, edging up closer to me in its wildness...
In the villages they tend to stay up late dancing, on the feast day of the crazy. I recall that I used to slip away unnoticed, for I was already well lost before I actually left. That strange hour in which I pondered my rebellion has crept back tonight to make my voice embrace itself. A dense fog comes drifting through the trees. The roses raise up the slumbers of the earth in their spiky veils. On this searing night of truth, I could hear my pain steal my life, which had hitherto lain safe in its enchanted depths.
When I reached the end of a path chosen quite by chance, the first thing I noticed was that the wind had changed direction and was now sweeping what seemed like dead leaves from bygone years, piling them up at my feet. I bent down and touched the grass along the slopes. Taken aback by the whispering of familiar haunts, I suddenly imagined my body might be a cloak for their secret.
I think I must already have been singing. My voice stole back my soul from the gods... Oh, that sweet minute plucked from the past and secreted within the hour of my return! With each step, the paths that lay behind me had been closed off. My life turns into its own song, indistinguishable from the dusk. Death assigns us a name, surprised by our yearning for a pure space which has been betrayed: it is like a woman in love who steals away through the dementia of the rose-bushes.
The winds of time go begging, plundering... The soul of nightfall had merged into the indifference on the face of things. And there was I, staring at myself, all sense of direction lost... A man, a poor countenance in which everything disowns itself. The awkward mistruth of a shadow. I gazed upon the earth and saw that a body, in its tender faithlessness, had located it in the sky.
A splendid scarf of blood, looming above the abyss. Then came the moment when the evening star draws the pastures open. The desert of my gaze casts light across the slopes. Weightless, the night trembled amid the drifting reeds, cradling the vines at my feet and the almond trees across which rode the dark winds.
The branches, the pathway, like a young girl's fetching smile, tore the veil from my heart, unfurling the immensity in my eyes. Each leaf borne off by autumn attracted a look, a cry of pain, from the untamed air. I trod stealthily on, gradually more aware of the marvellous pain I was suffering.
II.
How quickly passers-by move on! There must be a celebration somewhere. No body troubles to look at my face. I feel as if the thoughts of other people were trying to steal up my eyes.
Now the night's breath responds to the sea, which I can scarcely hear from here, as it reminisces about its shipwrecks. In a song's fading, my name is erased, amid the blossoms of windswept beauties. Is it really the love in my eyes which restores to life the tamarisks, the rooftops, the roses, when everything on which I look escapes from me into my eyes? In vain the beauty of the sunset draws tenderness about itself... Its universe could only describe itself by casting me out of my dream; and I know there is no one waiting for me, anywhere. The whole secret of the path I am following lies in the things I leave behind me forever.
Through the deafness of the night, the village risks sending out the same covert flame. Each voice has lapsed into the all-encompassing silence: its astonishing sweetness persudades me I should return to the petalled shadows of the farmhouses; where branches bearing lovely smiles float back from afar to merge into my dreams; across the slopes whose secret my heart is learning by heart.
Across my dreamy legends, a fragile hoeland reaches out to its exiled lilies. Skylines, shorelines, caresses, the countryside where I was born was fashioned by my heart and my eyes, as they swept across the fields, the daylight and all those hamlets, more mysterious still.
That murmuring in which the light hid from itself, those smells, that trickle of voices came drifting downwards from the sky, which my emotion sawi n rainbow colours, tracing its salts in the cycle of its seasons. An immense body, encircling my delirium, a body made of wind and sunlight, crouching and stretching, encompassing the existance of the slightest human echo. I knew I could identify it in whatever direction I looked, since it would pluck the same fruit for my eyes from the least obvious horizons; and then a smile waylaid that nostalgia wherein my childhood races after me. As if taking its bearing from my own, a woman's life offered the promise of fresh spaces to my infinite desire never to die.
And once the sweet ray of light had split apart amid flashes of bright flesh, my eyes could trace the shadows of desire upon a hidden countenance.
The laughter of young girls was incapable of describing happiness.
Love lay over their beauty like a summer's dawn upon sleeping eyes. The dance, with all its reminiscences of love, had stored its silver heart among the stars.
Nights of fire where flowers would crowd in, bringing silence. Eyes which would invent the time of year, within that blinding purple clash of atmospheres in which life disputed its own rights... When one is too close to daybreak, which erases all things, one has no idea how to wait, one doesn't even realise that one is waiting.
Hands blindly following their caresses! ... They conversed in low tones. Each name died away in my wayfarer's song, and the secret of that loveliest languate of all was lost forever.
It is in my heart that oblivion holds sway over tyhe eyes of those women who are no longer with us. I couldn't even work out how to ask which way to go.
III.
Why did life never identify its own reflection in my eyes? Everything on which I gazed had already abandoned me for good; thus it was that happiness passed me over, in songs, in farewells... It was the wind over the tombstones which nullified our words as we paused at the edge of everything, distanced even from ourselves, with the world opening its eyes anew in my dream.
Saddest of loves in which we were being dreamt by someone remote whom I could not trace and in whose shadow the memory of that evening comes back to me. Happiness has only ever been betrayed by its own shadow. . . Rocky hollow, thatched cottage or rat's nest, this is where you'll find bitterness, this is the summit at which the wanderer realises that what he has been seeking has meanwhile taken on the aspect of everything he has been trying to disown, and wonders if he might be on the verge of dying. Never again shall my sandals leave prints along the ruts. Never again shall children point me out in my black jacket or my corduroy trousers at the crossroads where I used to ask my way.
I cannot distinguish the road back from my own shadow. Oh, beauty of this evening which my heart makes even purer than the sky, where the stars pick out their partners, stealing me back from those who have given up waiting for me; its darkest song has reached its climax in my suffering.
. . . Wrapped within her smile, she brought me such bliss, and her child's gaiety was nourished by my life.
When her graceful eyes had reunited us in that great flight of evening, the stammerings of love sought the shadows of our lips, as each avowal, exposing the nakedness of the soul, brought our thoughts closer to silence, expiring once it had voiced its secret.
Her smile was a naked dream. It was her purity that made my soul visible; while I could just make out a slight heartbeat, offering little resistance to me at the black core of the abyss and repeating, each time more softly, the name she had given me in the act of love.
Such at least are the thoughts in which a former life is laid bare, the gold gleaming at the bottom of the goblet too heavy to lift up. For in that time of youth, the dream of love would float on a sombre stream, which recollection has now drunk dry. How strange it all is! The trees of a separate highway trembled in the background of our impatience. Did her forehead bow down to obey the forehead of that evening which once more I see in my dreams? It was as though she had sought through me to be free of her own reality.
And her smile, telling me that space has been found anew.
.........
Her smile has chosen its giddy path within my eyes. And truly she is there. Her look draws out my secrets from within the mystery of the stars.
In that far place she had a name, Anne or Marion, I can no longer be sure. Was she pretty? Her features memorised my childhood, and made my whole life transparent.
That face wherein I felt invoked, I confess to myself in a low voice that it had circled about my entire existence.
Ah! Then my every thought was synonymous with her life. She was always daydreaming, and I recall how her slightest smile would cut short her gaze. An unreal sadness loomed over her beauty.
In a single smile, she would confide the secret of her tears to my loving gaze.
The whole miraculous structure of her life was founded upon my own.
I would stare at her as though through a glimmering dawn: it was the purity of my own life which I was drinking from her eyes.
Yet a mysterious gate lay open within her shadow; and all my flesh was aware of black pathways and hovels and the silence one observes when the dead are near.
In the half-dark where her memory pursued me, voices fell silent beneath the clouds at my heels; the same fire shines through everyone else's eyes, and they all seem to wait to hear love spoken.
It is beneath such candles that the song is taken up again: there was once a girl who danced so much she lost her heart. Her mouth was fed on smiles alone. . .
The loveliest of the stars has raised up the night so as to blind me with its infinite presence; my gaze is submerged, like a silver ring tossed into the flood of my heart.
IV.
These new silences run so deep that I know my being must have changed its secrets.
I have thrown away the tiny lamp which cast a shadow as long as my entire journey. What might I not rediscover if I am now to be lost?
A ringing sound rises up from the links of chains slipped by the night. Now other words, words of the tenderest kind, slip reluctantly down from hair that is loosed. A path is quickly beaten across the rubble of the prison.
The rose of risk blossoms within my flesh, unfettered from my shadow: a single life has enfolded each gaze and all the silence within its wings.
The world soars up anew, illumined in a silken giddiness, and only the sky remains to bear witness to its artifice. Harbouring deep colours, a hand, raised over the very air I am breathing, dies as it persuades me to stay alive.
This is surely no time to try to track myself down to the place where I am standing. So that I may be free of this body which the earth insists on taking back, the sky, the sky in all its lightness, has absorbed me within the sweetness of belief.
The bulrush of love might point towards a shadow, were it to move. Mistakenly, some absence or other reverberates in the hidden depths of my vague tenderness. . .
My gaze is reborn from its shadows and steals across the plane-trees, the balcony and the year's array of flowers, whose profound truth has found me out at last. The same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. This is the land where everything depends on my life, where the one thing to inhibit love would be an excess of love.
A new world, capable of surprising me, a world in which every being can know itself and find its apotheosis in my desires. . . Caught up in their own brightness, the silvery plane-trees become marvelous visions in the night. . . In all those places which on enourished my thoughts, I see tears welling up in colourless eyes as they dream about my life. . .
. . .She has no idea at all how to make herself known. The delicacy of her approach is enough to dispel all hint of a storm. The translucency of those glances which her presence sets alight for me is like a candle wherein life caresses its eyes and selects its zephyr, reviving all those beauties in which my naked soul revealed itself to chance. . .
. . .Kisses, pink and various, and then faces.
Here is the age old dream of a gaze in which the spirit can drink itself in, absolving the daylight from its allegiance to my shadows, carry off the arc of my madness towards an iris no one can foresee.
Something like trepidation tells me there mustexist more light within the silence of things, within the fear of seeing my life's stagnancy disfigure those awakenings as they multiply about me; and I allow myself to be borne away on the winds towards those overflows where love tries to construct some sort of protection for itself. For in between my glances the winds traverse a landscape erased by the dazzling impulse of the flesh, across heather where I read the message of defenceless eyes.
Once there was a face in which the depths of my life were blown away, a face whose smile penetrated me deeper than my own dream.
Whereupon our eyes, true to their sky-blue hue, cast shadows across time.
Myosotis of the look, probing for sunlight in the crevices of time. Yes, I remember my youth. Inside my life, there was always a secondary life hidden away. A brother would peer into my happiness, with a benevolent eye.
His hands drew closer to my heart those unreal fields where love uncovers its chalice. He gazes on life, on the grass in the graveyards, on love as it fades. An hour's brightness floats between us, swollen like a tear about to fall.
The floodwater uncovers the heart of the last of the mermaids. In vain the wind invokes its departed spirits, predicting the death of all things that breathe and shine. My entire happiness is tied up inside my child's apron, and as I walk I shall turn to look back over my shadow's dream.
My cries are like the residue of blood that lingers in a deep wound. The sounds breathe, then die away. An enormous bowl of silence has been filled to the brim.
The world is like some alternative dream in which a heart falls apart; a dream in which the sky closes down its lid upon the secret of all things we love. I can make out the tracks, the darkening mountainside, even the shape of bodies, as lovely as oblivion, that rivulet in which the blue sky looks for solace. And still that same solitary star exhausts itself to the east of every single thing. Upon the eroded cliffs where I come to my senses, my steps gather up the shadow as it pours down from the sky.
Tonight, the thoughts of the dead are turning back to the earth. I manage to open my eyes again without forfeiting my heart. The trees and the grass at dusk intoxicate my thoughts, inciting them to slip back into the shadow in its natural state.
My soul pares itself at the centre of this nocturnal landscape. Wretched spirit, in thrall to all those lightning flashes, the utter blackness of the sky has paid off your ransom tonight.
Listen, through the composure of the olive trees, a tiny river can be seen: everything it says is addressed to the stars. Through the lattices, the very roses intensify the darkness. If you, the living, were to weep, your ears would strip me of everything.
The necklaces of your eyes describe the distant outline of those windswept villages. Here, complaints may only be voiced in a low murmur. A sad brother would read out what happiness meant. His heart has taken on all my suffering. I would weep softly were he to speak to me about myself.
But it is she whom he best remembers. Ann, or Marion - I forget which name linked her to life on this earth, where her laughter drew together the crowns of all the gods I have ever worshipped. And now her face is heavy with my secret.
I gaze upon her and sense that my life now can go no further. A star shoots bleeding across the skyline, a companion to the black wind. Silence comes sweeping across everything
*****
First published in Chantiers between January and March 1928.
Reprinted in Joe Bousquet: Oevre romanesque complete, Vol. 1.
French original copyright Albim Michel, 1979
Translated by Roger Cardinal.
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