Sunday, January 14, 1996

January 14

There is a long table. Seats, benches and on all sides strange objects in bright colors, photographs, cuttings from magazines, sketches, imitation flowers, ornaments like the cells of a beehive. A bed of grass, carefully mown, occasional lies, everyone to their own liking, in the evening to the ceremony of the changing, to get ahold of this enthralling (they prefer the extreme positions) exaltation to the point of redemption, contrary to all poetic justice. Everything embraces, everything conspires.

Now dark hut, sleep and angry voices, territorially extensive, flooded with proofs, instinctively slip into a bitter reveille or at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, of fire, invitation to seizure, ferocity’s abominable homage, knives, scissors, surgical instruments, early disasters, on this particular page her private belongings, the key word here is “offered” so to speak, blown out, a leaderless and often difficult individual life, beaten, well and truly beaten, put down without a great deal of bloodshed, if only as a ghost and as mere light reading. The old song and dance bored to distraction, words and shouts in silence a handicap in such a situation, does not seem to have flagged.

Not the slightest notion (the kitchen in spite of its glass door), to learn what this strange world is a precaution against, pulls her skirts right up, falls into the soft black hands.

The vast ineptitude of the venture might well have crowned our story, rendering certain the infinite, ceaseless chain of thousands, or a certain number (there was a certain number), a perfectly foul math problem. One hears of frightful immorality because of this.

Its dwelling place on the other side of the Alps, under another steel sky closes in, held by a thread to the stones, shaken by the wind, grave danger to the normal order. Important to be able to write in code. The corner of that piece of iron together with a strange feeling of humidity. There loomed out of the dark the dreaded vehicle, split by dizzying hooves, the knocking, pulling, pushing and wrenching, all the lovely china and beautiful chairs.

This complicated ritual.