January 28, 1996
How orderly the kitchen looks at night. Minus of course the murderous officers.
Time went with them, everything went, the world we used to know, the toils and occasional smiles, the bewildering thread. Furtive passages between enormous drifting. As birds that tumble from the clouds. Just the snow intact.
How deep the bleeding goes. With unfeigned passion into an abstraction bearing witness to a higher state of civilization. So wonderfully decorated. Blunt and deadly dull.
The night gone hysterical, with the swords drawn in a double avenue of chestnuts. What a decline. To plummet and return, hit the world at every plunge, disdaining men and oxygen, headed straight down, naked and helplessly full of hate. A ton of tin into the ocean. Ship sailing inexorably back and forth across borders, finished with the compass and chart, the common way and empty skies, the manifest difference of the whole world. Almost everything, that fragile edifice. A domed abyss, classical and inevitable.
We could have easily spent the rest of our days there, in the higher regions, wandering obscurely from the fall. Carrying the casket across the hatred of the artificial world, unbearable place heavy with human breath and circumstantial details, bright as patches of rouge. Those sounds, those calls from the forest, their enormous uselessness, interminably gesticulating, up the steep path overlooking hell.
The crowd developing a taste for pleasure in it as an unconscious kind of recognition to protect us, and on that ground alone turns inward and away, gains strength and casts off, as in an old abandoned riverbed, already no longer with us. As if flesh resists the puncture. Some marks as if to distinguish. Maybe none of all that is there, no thousand plagues, no earthly reason.
To lie down and sleep, pencil paralyzed, phraseless, yet it stirs, a voice that alters, dropped too deep, bent to the scaffold. Till we are less afraid. Till weights will hang like balm.
How orderly the kitchen looks at night. Minus of course the murderous officers.
Time went with them, everything went, the world we used to know, the toils and occasional smiles, the bewildering thread. Furtive passages between enormous drifting. As birds that tumble from the clouds. Just the snow intact.
How deep the bleeding goes. With unfeigned passion into an abstraction bearing witness to a higher state of civilization. So wonderfully decorated. Blunt and deadly dull.
The night gone hysterical, with the swords drawn in a double avenue of chestnuts. What a decline. To plummet and return, hit the world at every plunge, disdaining men and oxygen, headed straight down, naked and helplessly full of hate. A ton of tin into the ocean. Ship sailing inexorably back and forth across borders, finished with the compass and chart, the common way and empty skies, the manifest difference of the whole world. Almost everything, that fragile edifice. A domed abyss, classical and inevitable.
We could have easily spent the rest of our days there, in the higher regions, wandering obscurely from the fall. Carrying the casket across the hatred of the artificial world, unbearable place heavy with human breath and circumstantial details, bright as patches of rouge. Those sounds, those calls from the forest, their enormous uselessness, interminably gesticulating, up the steep path overlooking hell.
The crowd developing a taste for pleasure in it as an unconscious kind of recognition to protect us, and on that ground alone turns inward and away, gains strength and casts off, as in an old abandoned riverbed, already no longer with us. As if flesh resists the puncture. Some marks as if to distinguish. Maybe none of all that is there, no thousand plagues, no earthly reason.
To lie down and sleep, pencil paralyzed, phraseless, yet it stirs, a voice that alters, dropped too deep, bent to the scaffold. Till we are less afraid. Till weights will hang like balm.
posted by Scott MacLeod at 1:46 PM
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