February 27

The flickering of disintegrating minutae of no importance. Step by step in black cotton stockings. Stumble slowly over the iron threshold, by a calculated detour, into deeply-disturbed and fervently religious times. Melancholic behavior swept over Europe, slow, silent, negligent, refusing the light. Obscure fantasies unknown to all. Vanities and false extravagances from this slough of iniquity, these harsh words and the ready response of the population. To seek consolation and diversion on the black market in exchange for doubts, conflicts and ultimate disaster. To dispel the phantasmagoria and burn them to ashes. All the world a matter so worthless, all taken by feelings and words, completely ruined and damaged. Peopled with ghostlike figures in small groups, irresolute and bewildered, in landscapes profoundly pierced with grief. Finally walking themselves into hotel rooms, into a peaceful routine ( not a small thing in the heart), a hiding-place without an outlet. Amateur historians gathered in lobbies to formulate a body of social theory, in simplified fashion and at considerable length. The strange enterprise, repeatedly regenerated, crucially ambiguous, monuments against dissolution. Such a compelling and splendid display, as when everyone was putting out flags as though celebrating a reunion, of words appropriate to heal the ravaged bodies. In any age these have always been displayed. Beauty in the most profound distortion. An illusion that conceals. Wreckage upon wreckage. Hourglasses, stacks of music, faded photographs. Mouth full of gold teeth.

Nature, in itself, is not unusual, obscures more than it clarifies, in the context of our inquiry, all these arguments and counter-arguments, these misadventures of fictitious persons in the idyllic and ghostly streets. An eccentric and debauched life sustained in the misery of the present in a thousand horrid ways. The enigma of the relation between work and the personality, repeated each morning as I imagine it, down there in the street.

A seer of ghosts and their hands.

Listen to the men talk amid trees on gravel paths, making dark sounds within the heirarchies that surround them. The insoluble riddles dissipating in the daily round into one indistinguishable whole. Blessings, curses, swallowed up by the crowd or otherwise faded and died away. Their love-objects lying in blood. May well have become metamorphosed: differentiation through destruction, as a function of the fragmenting behind every assessment.

Simply men in search of easier lives.

In no way surprised by their incapacity in the face of catastrophe.

The shadow of the presence of something lacking hovers, to call the witness a liar.

Never never surprised to have awoken into this brief drama in flesh, this exile in a frame which wipes away tears, and her voice, without the slightest embarrassment.

In the forests who was not possessed?

To flee into the dark of night, exchange poison for the gallows, something more than technique. The limitations of a mere awareness.

Weightless weight in my arms. An allusion to the right of self-extinction. To the issue of resistance.

Vanished off in the train soon after being born.

How cold iron tastes.