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.
June 3, 2008
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.
November 9, 2007
Emperor Huangdi Loses His Black Pearl
Emperor Huangdi travelled to the northern side of the Chishui River and climbed the Kunlun Mountains. On his way back he lost his black pearl. He sent Zhi (1) to find it but Zhi failed. Then he sent Lizhu, (2) who also failed. Finally he sent Xiangwang (4) and Xiangwang found it. "It is really strange," the emperor exclaimed, "that Xiangwang should have got it!"
(1) Zhi: a clever god.
(2) Lizhu: a god with sharp eyes.
(3) Chigou: a god good at debating.
(4) Xiangwang: a careless, absent minded god
From 100 Chinese Myths and Fantasies translated by Ding Wangdao
(1) Zhi: a clever god.
(2) Lizhu: a god with sharp eyes.
(3) Chigou: a god good at debating.
(4) Xiangwang: a careless, absent minded god
From 100 Chinese Myths and Fantasies translated by Ding Wangdao
Dansemuse
An awful translation via Babelfish, from Le Genie D'oc Et L'homme Mediterraneen, which is as best I can tell an anthology of French literature. (according to Babelfish it means "Genie of oc and the Mediteranean Man").
DANSEMUSE
I
It is lacking some a word
That it has the heart like front,
It runs or the days fly,
It was born with the wind.
II
Its lips think for it;
All birds of the setting one
Their wings burn together
With what shone in its songs.
III
The hours follow its shade;
It loses them in the flowers,
Not guessing that their number has
That it was all in their heart.
IV
It is gray and known as insane
And dances has to close the eyes
A heart beats in its words,
No one does not know or are its skies.
V
Like a star in its branches
Its frankness grasped evenings
It is the white pink.
It should be liked to see it.
VI
A tear raméne
With daylight
Or the man informs of his sorrows
The child who it is for always.
VII
And, in the wind which walks on,
It is the sleepless night of the tears
Whose orphan light
Knows that it is dawning in the heart.
Joe Bousquet
DANSEMUSE
I
It is lacking some a word
That it has the heart like front,
It runs or the days fly,
It was born with the wind.
II
Its lips think for it;
All birds of the setting one
Their wings burn together
With what shone in its songs.
III
The hours follow its shade;
It loses them in the flowers,
Not guessing that their number has
That it was all in their heart.
IV
It is gray and known as insane
And dances has to close the eyes
A heart beats in its words,
No one does not know or are its skies.
V
Like a star in its branches
Its frankness grasped evenings
It is the white pink.
It should be liked to see it.
VI
A tear raméne
With daylight
Or the man informs of his sorrows
The child who it is for always.
VII
And, in the wind which walks on,
It is the sleepless night of the tears
Whose orphan light
Knows that it is dawning in the heart.
Joe Bousquet
November 1, 2007
The Phantom at the Hamburger Stand
It was the middle of the afternoon when he cut through the parking lot on his bicycle. His backpack slung low over his shoulder, he leaned in front of me on the railing with his head close to the window. I couldn't hear exactly what he was saying over the train whistle overhead. He pulled a few crumpled dollars out of his jeans and flattened them on the counter with his palm, sliding it to the attendant who promptly disappeared. The window stood in front of me. I went through the same charade, flattening the paper currency on the counter. We stood gracelessly. He held his bike while away from his body while I bent my neck awkwardly looking between the trashcan and the ground. From the window the attendant held a paper cylinder, calling out in my direction. "Thirsty?" he said as I plunged the straw into my prize. "Yeah." "Say, I come here about every day after work. There ain't nothin' beat a good burger, I usually get two or three. You work by here?" "Yeah, I work at the library." "There's a library near hear? No kidding?" "It's on the avenue behind Wendy's" "No foolin' you ever get busy?" "Some days," I replied and took another drink. He said, "Yes sir, I do my best to keep up with the machines," he was looking past the railroad tracks. "I work over there, in the warehouse. They pay me and I try my best to keep up and I get me three cheeseburgers," he said with a wink. "I figure I'll work here 'till I can't keep up no more then I'll move along." We both stared into the distance. The air was like glass, despite the smoke stacks, a cluster of totems on every horizon. A cement truck floated past, grumbling and churning. Beneath its noise, the attendant said something and shoved a white bag in his direction. Getting onto his bicycle, he thanked her and took the package. Wobbling across the parking lot, he turned and said, "You have a great Halloween, my man." I thanked him, wished him the same, and turned around to see my bag waiting for me. Walking towards my car, I saw him hobble across the street on his bike. A train was scooting ahead of him. At first I saw him wobbling towards the crossing, then he went straight into it. Between the passing cars, I saw him safe on the other side, the wheels floating along the pavement towards the warehouse where he would work on his machines.
October 28, 2007
The bridge
Inside the convenient store it was dark. The cars were piled in the narrow lot, crammed and angled abruptly against the walls, which extended far higher than the lot was wide. The sky was a blue slither that shone between the tops of the buildings, velvet against concrete. The air was steel. I was frantically grabbing little bags of Doritos and barbecue chips, dropping an armful on the counter. The attendant looked as if he had been working on cars all morning. I gave him a bag of shells and a book of matches in exchange for a handful of the chips. I walked outside, the air hurt like cold water. I paused in front of my car, some chips landing on the hood while I fumbled for my keys. While I was doing this, an older middle-aged couple was getting into a rusty station wagon. The rust spoke to me in long sentences. I pulled a napkin from my pocket, ran to them yelling and spitting, "give me your car or I'll tear this into little pieces!" They panicked, dropped their things and complied, the old man's blue blockers falling onto the pavement along with his papers. I told them to get in. I swung open the door and climbed into the back seat, the napkin falling into a dark puddle of antifreeze. I took hold of the steering wheel, which was fixed to the back of the driver's seat. "What kind of gas mileage does this get?" "Oh, about 43 miles to the gallon. But if you push this button you can run indefinitely on one tank. The problem is the word 'indefinite'. You could theoretically run out at any minute, it depends on the weather." We screeched out of the lot, after backing into the opposite wall. "Why is the driver's seat in back?" "Because his back is broken," the woman said. "How did this happen?" I asked, swerving around parked cars. "Swimming pool accident," he said looking back at me with his greasy comb over. He had been shaving with motor oil. "I was putting chlorine in the pool when I slipped. My spine was fractured in three places when I landed against the corner of the pool. The doctors say I'm lucky to be alive." "You seem like your moving around pretty well for a man whose spine is in pieces." He made a greasy noise that was probably meant to be a laugh. "Don't it?" He pulled a cigarette from the glove compartment. The wife slapped him. "I thought you quit." He put it down and pushed up his blue blockers, looking her in the eye. The car smashed into the side of a building, his head made a bulging spider web in the passenger side window. We sat for a moment, the woman's breath rasping in shock and the man wincing at his head injury, which had left strawberry jam all over the window and his forehead. "I'm used to smaller cars," I apologized. The man looked back at me, a lens gone from his blue blockers. He lifted the cigarette to his mouth and flicked his lighter; I asked him if he wanted any toast. He inhaled the smoke and handed me a package of coconut and chocolate cookies, the ones with the stripes of chocolate across the top and the hole in the middle. I put the car in reverse, and we floated off the sidewalk back onto the street. I made a mental note never to steal a car that had to be driven from the backseat, because it felt like driving a building through flood waters, where every window was the blind spot. In the front seat, the man and his wife had set up a game of Mousetrap, she still shrieking from the shock of the collision and he holding a piece of toast to his strawberry skull. The street and its traffic were flowing faster now, the car now gently swelled on its swift current. I took the peppermint out of my mouth and said to the woman, "should I turn left here?" "Yes, we'll cross the River here." The man glanced back at me and smiled, his broken sunglasses atop his head and the strawberry jam dried on his temple. The car drifted around the bend. We glided up the ramp and onto the bridge.
September 30, 2007
The Apparition on the Boardwalk
It was about three in the afternoon when I found myself on a pier in the middle of a forest, with a small gathering of friends. There was some talk of exploring because we all had found ourselves there unexpectedly but not alarmingly. The forest reminded me of those that grow across the coastal regions in the Carolinas, or at least those that can be seen along the interstates. In the gaps between the planks of the pier I could see shoots of grass and clumps of weeds, tending more towards yellows and pale greens than towards the deeper browns and drab olives indigenous to the Midwest. Where we stood the sky was a pale grey ceiling over the path that bent suddenly into the distance on either side. The pier was no different than any pier I had ever been on, with the exception of its apparent length and tendency to bend irregularly out of sight so that you were always on the cusp of a bend but never actually perceived the turn. There was a wooden railing on either side, reinforced by the thick underbrush that almost touched the chest high railing. Where we stood, it felt as if the pier was precariously floating on the surface of the amber brush. What was especially odd (as in all dreams) was the lack of shadow. Which is not to say they were entirely absent, but the golden grey afternoon light was so diffused it was as if every object, regardless of its density, had furnished its own internal illumination. Gradually becoming accustomed to the unfamiliar surroundings, silently soaking in every detail, we began walking. At first the scenery did not change but for the particulars. Here and there a sapling tree approached the railing, often the only reminder that we were indeed moving through space. Every several hundred yards the pier would empty into an octagonal landing, with wooden benches attatched along the railing. These landings tended to signify an abruptly shift in direction, usually of only fifteen or twenty degrees and almost always to the left. Occasionally the path did bend to the right, and when it did so it heightened our sense of mystery. We walked without speaking; allowing ourselves to silently converse with the surroundings that gradually became more golden as the sun shrank unseen behind the overcast clouds. I don't know how long we had been walking, or how far we had come, when we found ourselves upon a fork in the pier. Still without any need for words we split into two groups and agreed to share our discoveries when the pier inevitably joined again. The angle that the pier split was very acute, for several yards there was hardly more than a few inches separating them. I traveled left, in a path that tunneled into the denser part of the forest. Entering the woods, the swift canopy of leaves and branches dotted with golden sky dotted the wooden pier with flecks of pale sunlight. By the time we had entered the wooded tunnel, the other path was far out of sight. The shadows had become much more pronounced. Objects had not necessarily given up their internal light source, but they had become subordinate to the single obscured sun. It was here that I recall after several minutes something like a wild folk song coming from behind the wall of trees on either side. Sounds of flutes, lyres, percussion, and singing floated on the golden flecks of light. As we walked on, I seemed to begin to glimpse the sound out of the corner of my eye, bright spinning shimmers darting from in between tree trunks and instantly out of sight. I was able to hold on to one with my eyes for a few short seconds, only for it to cave in on itself and scurry back towards its unseen hideout perpetually directly behind me. I called back to it with my memory and tried to focus on its quick and impossible counter-clockwise golden spinning. It was as if the flickering of a thousand precious gems were to lift from their sources into a perpetual tilting somersault of white light. Still replaying the event within my memory I attempted to step forward, but the apparition neither grew closer nor shifted in perspective. It had fixed itself to my eyes rather than I to it. I drew forward again and realized my feet were no longer touching the ground. The pier dropped from beneath me. Distracted I lost focus on the apparition, and in doing so I had no way of knowing whether I was in the present or still within some projection of my memory. The ceiling was now within reach and did not even require straightening my elbow to touch it. As I had suspected its surface was smooth and invisible, with only the appearance of branches, leaves and sky. From beneath I had guessed this but it had been only by intuition. From this vantage point it was not unlike placing ones eye directly level with the curved glass screen of an older television. The image was still in tact, but it became much more difficult to gather its location. The leaves and sky, still alive and fluttering, had aligned themselves with the curvature of the ceiling, which both was and was not, like the scene was being projected from a single point onto the back of a one-sided mirror. Without knowing exactly how I lowered myself towards the pier. I looked and saw no one, so I conjectured I had somehow slipped through a crack into my memory and was traveling in that space rather than the physical space I had purportedly been in, all as if I were in a dream within a dream. Like an astronaut on the moon, I leaped weightlessly along the pier no longer bound by gravity.
Neither flying nor walking, I could not tell how much time had passed since the apparition visited me. The sun stood still in the sky beyond the glass. I leaped effortlessly for miles, brushing the tips of my fingers along the smooth ceiling and lightly sinking down, blood rushing heavily to my face, and then bouncing off the wooden pier like a trampoline, which seemed to bend endlessly into the distance. Gradually it began to veer right, into mystery and eventually back to the pier which had been left behind eons ago.
Until now a sense of time had eluded me. It struck how long it had been since I had seen any of my companions. As I was wondering where I was and where they were, I expected to meet the ceiling I continued rising into what were, as far as I could tell, real branches. The feeling was peculiar and disorienting, like putting ones foot down unexpectedly at the bottom of a staircase anticipiating a step that does not exist. Dizzy, I began to sink and I saw around me the abrupt beginnings of other piers, jutting in various directions from high among the branches. I grabbed hold of one and pulled myself onto it. Peering over the edge my own pier was below, a wavering distant mirage through the gentle flickering of the trees. Still on my hands and knees I turned towards the new pier, seeing it go on, unaware, deep into its own tunnel, that there was ever anything beneath it. Through the cracks in the boards I could see the same golden sea of underbrush, now more shadowed by the sinking sun. The earth felt as solid as it ever had, its firmness incompatible with the dizzying hundreds of feet below and the other piers which began or ended abruptly into the web of branches and leaves. I turned around and began walking along the new pier, until the frightening chasm behind me was no longer in sight.
Above me came distant murmuring voices. I looked up and saw the underside of an octagonal landing, perched by its self high among the branches. I jumped, not sure what to expect, having not explored the ceilings of this tunnel, and was surprised to find my companions, who had taken the other path, sitting on the bench. They were happy, but not surprised, at my arrival. They had learned to jump as I had, and had been leaping from one landing to another and had just stopped to try and discern their location. I told them of the apparition and the chasm of an infinity of tunnels, and we agreed to head back the way they came. We leapt off the landing towards the next one perched a dozen or so yards away. Our feet did not land where we thought they should have. We were on another pier, only this one was knee deep in snow. But the snow was not snow. It was cool, and it did not melt or leave my legs chilled. It was tropical snow. Then I realized I had never left my memory.
"You don't exist, do you?" I said to my friends who were bewilderedly enjoying the strange precipitation much as I had been. They stopped. I realized I had never actually looked directly at them, or even given a thought as to how many of us there were. I had a feeling there were three or four of us, but when I tried to focus on one I found I could not. As long as I accepted I was with company, they seemed undisturbed, quite solid in their own half being. But now out of the woods in this golden-flecked light and warm snow I felt the need to put my finger on them and something undefined resisted. The woods had shrunk away by some strange slight while we were observing the peculiar precipitation, and we were on a submerged pier in a snow covered plain. There was more than two of them and less than four, but their number was neither two, three nor four. Then from behind me I heard someone call my name. The others had arrived. Seeing the faces of the others, bewildered at my realization, they suggested sledding on our bellies. "How many of you are there? Do you have a number?" I shouted. Giggling, they dragged me into the snow and the pier became a slope. At the bottom of the hill I stood up and saw I had come to the end of the snow, which tapered by degrees into the boards of the pier. I stepped onto the planks, the creamy powder falling off my pant legs with each step.
I looked up and I was within the golden light. There were no woods, no golden underbrush, and no sky. The boardwalk, too, was gone. There was only light.
Neither flying nor walking, I could not tell how much time had passed since the apparition visited me. The sun stood still in the sky beyond the glass. I leaped effortlessly for miles, brushing the tips of my fingers along the smooth ceiling and lightly sinking down, blood rushing heavily to my face, and then bouncing off the wooden pier like a trampoline, which seemed to bend endlessly into the distance. Gradually it began to veer right, into mystery and eventually back to the pier which had been left behind eons ago.
Until now a sense of time had eluded me. It struck how long it had been since I had seen any of my companions. As I was wondering where I was and where they were, I expected to meet the ceiling I continued rising into what were, as far as I could tell, real branches. The feeling was peculiar and disorienting, like putting ones foot down unexpectedly at the bottom of a staircase anticipiating a step that does not exist. Dizzy, I began to sink and I saw around me the abrupt beginnings of other piers, jutting in various directions from high among the branches. I grabbed hold of one and pulled myself onto it. Peering over the edge my own pier was below, a wavering distant mirage through the gentle flickering of the trees. Still on my hands and knees I turned towards the new pier, seeing it go on, unaware, deep into its own tunnel, that there was ever anything beneath it. Through the cracks in the boards I could see the same golden sea of underbrush, now more shadowed by the sinking sun. The earth felt as solid as it ever had, its firmness incompatible with the dizzying hundreds of feet below and the other piers which began or ended abruptly into the web of branches and leaves. I turned around and began walking along the new pier, until the frightening chasm behind me was no longer in sight.
Above me came distant murmuring voices. I looked up and saw the underside of an octagonal landing, perched by its self high among the branches. I jumped, not sure what to expect, having not explored the ceilings of this tunnel, and was surprised to find my companions, who had taken the other path, sitting on the bench. They were happy, but not surprised, at my arrival. They had learned to jump as I had, and had been leaping from one landing to another and had just stopped to try and discern their location. I told them of the apparition and the chasm of an infinity of tunnels, and we agreed to head back the way they came. We leapt off the landing towards the next one perched a dozen or so yards away. Our feet did not land where we thought they should have. We were on another pier, only this one was knee deep in snow. But the snow was not snow. It was cool, and it did not melt or leave my legs chilled. It was tropical snow. Then I realized I had never left my memory.
"You don't exist, do you?" I said to my friends who were bewilderedly enjoying the strange precipitation much as I had been. They stopped. I realized I had never actually looked directly at them, or even given a thought as to how many of us there were. I had a feeling there were three or four of us, but when I tried to focus on one I found I could not. As long as I accepted I was with company, they seemed undisturbed, quite solid in their own half being. But now out of the woods in this golden-flecked light and warm snow I felt the need to put my finger on them and something undefined resisted. The woods had shrunk away by some strange slight while we were observing the peculiar precipitation, and we were on a submerged pier in a snow covered plain. There was more than two of them and less than four, but their number was neither two, three nor four. Then from behind me I heard someone call my name. The others had arrived. Seeing the faces of the others, bewildered at my realization, they suggested sledding on our bellies. "How many of you are there? Do you have a number?" I shouted. Giggling, they dragged me into the snow and the pier became a slope. At the bottom of the hill I stood up and saw I had come to the end of the snow, which tapered by degrees into the boards of the pier. I stepped onto the planks, the creamy powder falling off my pant legs with each step.
I looked up and I was within the golden light. There were no woods, no golden underbrush, and no sky. The boardwalk, too, was gone. There was only light.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)