December 27, 1995

As catastrophes, inseperable, they overlap, they are entangled, identical, identical, and very black. The same center, in a supple regime, any strange town, any grey beach under rain. Just another local phenomenon. At home, keeping the coffee warm in her little apartment overlooking the middle class. The predetermined truth of the situation according to the order of the city, itself further, though less visibly, in air, signalling its own limits. Legs, mouths, teeth, fingers. Certain identities and clothes where the character of individuality pauses. The engineer as the thing itself. Fingers, warm coffee. A hole in the pipe. There is no social system over mysteries of instinct. Instead there is always something like a war under the world’s pretension, which exacerbates instead of healing. Even the edges shake. The Swiss-Italian alps are, have to be, nomads, as if physical history comes with it, disappears into the military and criminal world. Liquid assets of war, we might say. Created, exhausted or transformed, or catastrophic if preferred, on the bottom, in the army, on the job. Sustained and nourished and cherished without a model, without a chance. Mouths, teeth, all the segments swelling, gambling, cajoling, without, however, ceasing, or reaching their limits. Conclusions other than death are simply failures of energy. Various dusts, experience scattered into a discouraging fiction. Better than our own world becoming indiscernible. Virtually nothing to see. No steam-whistles blow on the other track. Conspiratorial tremors express nothing. Desire, which is an empty space, a parade of religious objects past a dead murderer. A series of midnight journeys, topics for our brooding, stage directions, messages, life turns to the demons inside wheat, wine, olive: they are probably up to something they shouldn’t be during the performance of their duties and the implementation of the law. No boots made without brutal method. The worst architect from the best of bees, the product forged by lightning and collapsed stones, wood, bones and shells, under man’s superintendance. Baskets and jars, iron rust and wood rot, seize upon these things and rouse them from their death-sleep, these places we imagine in Breughel, these demolished buildings in a place apart, these places where everyone ends up, in hotels, in dreams locked tightly around wedding bells and death, in rivers of blood in all the streets, the impossible place and its impossible tongue, man in his senses, foundered or crippled by them, wasted by wear and tear and weak death. Death or its synonyms. So many abodes the world furnishes, reproducing in miniature the affections we call our own in taking up the atrocious dream. The bread consumed in the hidden abode of the body. Good and white and smooth dreams, and the flight down into the kitchen every day. Wild animals with an anxious eye. Silence falls over the middle-class produced terror of the central point. The taste of the porridge does not tell you who grew the oats, tilled the modest farm, hired the horse. No one remembers what the original plan was but the procession continues, on either side, a kind of recognition which demands and contains. Nothing is more explicit. So the prose grinds to a halt. Marooned. A dog hunting with a pack.