March 3

Through the window, the melted snow, with thousands of living bodies. Mounds of earth like weeds scattered. The structure and function of the social body. To govern, as though in empty space. To reappear at the wrong season. Little games, to bring back courage to the unknown and threatening territory.

A small group, stamping their feet. A harsh communality, experiencing the entity called “the whole world.”

Shadows. Mechanical things in love with hiding and the prone position. The pleasure of clean sheets. Hesitating, like a bride, reluctant as she is (to confess it) to grow old among the bourgeoisie of Europe. To live just for that, to take on the drab look. Controlled and forgotten, the vacuum left behind. And let it die with a stranger in a bunker.

Who lives, who dies.

The walls almost meet every night, numbered in the long uneven term, the lingering collapse of an unestablished future fixed on the momentary ground. Particles collapsing slowly compared to the lifting of a shutter. Space is split into loci, sharp subtractions from the sum. The imaginary and the real, nature without scale, stupendous diameters disintegrated into the numbers on her arm. Economy bestowed upon the world with such disorderly violence. Thirty pieces of silver being an honest transaction in the realm of grammatical fiction. Frightened flowers to the grave of the positivist. Moral exaltation, which would certainly be a fine surprise. A little out of sight in so much possession of all. Barely remembering to starve. Piety and blasphemy coalesced permanently in an abnormal state, this bundle on the table. Itself like all the rest nothing but paper divided into question and answer. The stuttering shape of an old quarrel and endless repetition. An apparently uncheckable impetus to work on the pile of documents will collapse before the rails are dull with rust. Subdued, as it were, by the debts and the guilt. Abandoning the route between the road and the ditch.

Radio silence settles over the ruins of the artifact-world. Forest fires spread and bury all the roads. Science cannot overtake oblivion, those momentary ecstasies to come. Amorous agonies during acts devoid of joy, bodies visible on the bed, a paradise of shivering rags, of wreckage and shadow, of rafts of nakedness. This carnal soil, insensitive earth, this empty hour, had always been the time of exile.

Flesh, long silence, as if clad in iron, entombed by small desires. No face, just the box. Iodine upon the cataract. Blood, but in no great quantity. A loose, timeless sequence. The impression of having slept a little, eyes shut.

A normal, rather faded light, for dawn. The running of a solemn ceremony, same dark earth and sky, a territory for ghosts homesick for eternity. Weary of naked facts, so weary. Uncertainty in its most palpable form, embarking on such a long explanation, as though fleeing and seeking the dumb reproach of those who have been in the grave longest. The grotesque absurdity of the text hovers, an object on the dissecting table, inferior, having once seen the living original, only as a faint echo, and, like the dead in the graveyard, sing to keep the dark away for a few seconds. The convulsive heart defies topography, sacrifices space to gain time, which is the despot.

Last little body sunk down by the window. Trying to listen to the open sky passing closer and closer, a stringed instrument vibrating the air underneath, slowly opening leaves.

The surface of the snow all glimmer again.