Anne Frank In Jerusalem

1996-03-09T18:36:00.000-08:00

March 9

By some inexplicable privilege everything remains just as it was, till in the end we feel more or less comfortable, like a souvenir on a shelf. Sleeping long, evoking the calm waters.

From summary to more.

Succeeded, of course.

Clear enough.

-

The work between them: to memorize the objects in a picture. An entire day listening to nothing claiming the greater part of the labor. Fragments that exist side by side laboring in silence, bent forward to trace themselves together. All the furniture in the room lifts up bits of film. Years have lacerated their feet. Yellow, white and grey, disposed horizontally to fit into a real night, and no more.

None of it is exactly cheering. (What fear is, makes me envious)

Trust to luck and do nothing but work. The entire human race sits invisibly, ceases to be simple reporting: the eye not blind the heart neither stony nor corrupt. Swallowed-up and drowned in the artificial noise, our planet, radiating towards our planet. Then suddenly the ordinary: (they have hearts too and can be different)

- by virtue of being born, perhaps for nothing.

- a short rest and a little while to recover.

- a sack of wood wool, then we may sleep.

- the crack of a closed window. feel my heart beating, carry it away, and the dialogue that follows, all relations broken already with that ferocious world, death and phantoms, bare helpless and unarmed, at least outside the transforming realm (one can hardly call upon the world)

-

we hope they will bring us safely to dry land.

-

And after that?

Towards each other and smile?

The mountains that gleam in the sun?

-

Sleep, sleep, she murmurs, we are on shore, we are sitting in any of our opera houses, on a suitcase of notes which might teach us everything, the map of our first country of love, an erogenous flood, an inundation, a greatly-enlarged terrain, a document of great length and squalor, a mortal shape carrying evil to the limit in the voiceless heart. Writing, transfixed, cannot help deserting us, trailing, broken off among the constant implications of tragedy, forgotten in a ditch, in an ancient grave, overgrown into what it touches and comprehends.

Ourselves in a pine forest.

The sound of approaching footsteps scatters the white fragments.

1996-03-05T18:35:00.000-08:00

March 5

Yesterday is old, lost by accident upon a wheel of smoke.

Half of the world’s population, filled with blind discipline and absolute trust, lies down to sleep in the factory yards.

Exhausted ballet.

Bells are sounded, that river mingles with their weeping.

The crowd still waits in the darkened temple. Pale in their black dresses. Candles no larger than themselves. Phantoms enter.

Hearts too heavy, in the end.

Why could one not just live and breathe and walk through the snow?

1996-03-04T18:33:00.000-08:00

March 4

This particular form is crucial, militates against analysis. A story of confusion, undirected, certainly considered delinquent. Letters that endlessly repeat themselves across rubble and scattered ashes, a shameful display, dangerous and necessary, necessary. Formulation is finally exhausted enough to eradicate memory, until the blood speaks most directly, drops down into the recesses, down through the stark columns of figures being severed with familiar violence. Night falls and history returns, to be deprived of actual possessions, to evade all forms anchored in the prohibition against fragmentation and collapse. Repeatedly to return to the same vast, empty spaces within circles of refusals and prohibitions, towards roaming desire which cannot be denied.

Shame, the hook, hanging empty, trampled in the dust by documentary evidence, by the simple expedient of flight. The stern demands of moral conduct, the traditional language of allegory, the moral and literary climate, exemplary conduct, scandal, the passing moment, the assault of objects under the pretense of prayer: leave them all behind without a thought, and not be quieted with answers.

Obscenity and indecency are not confined among ambiguous allusions and representations of moral deformity. The majority of perpetrators minimize or even deny unruly conduct and brutal realism (have often), to the great satisfaction of all the academicians. The peculiar tangle of facts and fiction and the subconscious desires they share open up a number of problems in such a way that only death can deliver the heart from the chain. No documents inform us without intent to defraud. The actual proceedings need little comment: we are flagrant violators of law and decency, guilty of violence, theft and murder, capable of infinite patience and relentless self-criticism, a characteristic disparity pursuing identical aim. Poised, cunning, ready for the moment, the door opening into an empty street. Enlarged rather than diminished. In this conglomeration, beautiful.

Memory drowns me, like the sea within the circumference of a single brain, some soft place within our own paradise diminished. Hindered, haunted, perishing, still to be explained. Heavens left absent till sunrise takes us back, a mourner walking among children. To live for this. To rise and go, unspeakable, home. To wind the incarnation bell in a country with nothing, to labor long and hard against the restrictive technicality of death’s local revolution. To find the species disappeared, transported wild to the graves, and start all over again, and to have patience.

Debout, assis, à genoux. Zero at the bone.

The privilege to live, the warrant to report. Present at, participating in hallucinations and delusions and anomalies. Blood stained uniforms. Notes on everything, underneath everything, an improbable depth to express absence where I found her, one night, first alone, then saw everything annihilated, humanity in ruins and their names forgotten. Finished creatures, departed, fictitious, repealed from observation. To these desolate territories as an equal, as a judge. Into possession of them at last, disturbing their nights by singing, all energies restored. The breath contracts in worldly indifference, stammering, while women (it could not possibly be otherwise) lie in darkness with open eyes, suspended in a silent ceremony of mourning, for the other. Returning through thickets of hatred to the deepest chasm, with eyes closed and hands adequate as drums to tombs. Nameless fathoms weary of description, a certain regret which utters and haunts, to possess past the instant. Another loneliness which lifts us from the ground, not admitting of the wound, a list of names incised in the resonant bodies. Strangers to ourselves, we are lifted up as if from the depths of a well.

Shadows walk upon the hills, the whitewashed wall that bounds the room. The ceiling moving, sweeping aloft and breaking in the night until it seems to be moving slowly against the sky, on its nocturnal surface round the tower, a flock of dark birds. Our usual business caught helpless at her usual place in the corner by the light of the lamp, that whole ghostly latitudeless place, unaltered. Nowhere only somehow home.

1996-03-03T18:31:00.000-08:00

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.

1996-03-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

March 2

Figures rise exhausted by night’s companion, departing for an empty space in a state of chronic boredom. The entire world displayed, the memory of all previous minutes in this masonry built without song. Lost in this century.

Flakes of snow. The long shadow of death in the drift of eastern grey. Darkness intersects the freezing sun on the zinc roofs of Europe. Part of an orderly routine drawn with astonishing accuracy. Citadels dissolve, the murmured patterns perish, simply to look at them. The infinite enacted. In this fictitious harbor. The drowning, exhausted, die in silence.

Those who will have lived through it burning as usual. Disturbed by an absence. Alive and debauched, stumbling through the room in the intervals, moving in silence rapidly towards a conclusion. Railway cars moving along rails to so many cities and countries at once. Cast-iron refrains in the fragile silence everywhere. An acoustic relay through darkness back to memory, sparks from a slab of marble. Leaves unhooked from trees. Figures, pale silhouettes moving on wires through polar air, frenzied stars, the dark surge of uniforms into the corridor.

Prearranged text, a colorless room, all speeches clinging to the walls. The blind, barred window-pane.

The body stands without bones, restricted to simple sentences, never to leave the city of the flesh.

1996-03-01T18:29:00.000-08:00

March 1

Making history is to recognize the corpses of the drowned, the numbered names that had hung there on a heap of instruments, those veiled faces dropped into ether. The changing forms of the surface. Even thought, on its prescribed and inevitable course down to its final consequence. Simple memory, but what a scare.

Come, fiction, and disappear, diluted by possibility. Artificial paradises conceal proof of a projected crime, that girl, speech full of unarmed encounter with the self. Trying the hard method to accelerate the process of thought. Under the painful compulsion to purge and reorganize the many hypotheses and deductions repeatedly in somewhat obscure contexts. That dull girl, limited to grammatical abstractions, an immigrants address in the presence of certain silences.

The future, the heaviest freight, moves on, never speaks. Returns, appalls, convicts. A morbid psychosis which reminds men of their existence, that continent trod by guilty feet due to the carelessness of the scaffold. We almost cease to fear the outside world, the glittering frontier of evidence, anything proclaimed by accident in the breathing spaces. The eyes, accosted, surrender, still full of illusions, having organized or planned the cautious surface of the years alone in front of the oven. To pieces on the stones settled in their sockets.

Behind the door, on the wall, the only trace left remains silent, shuns observation. In silence the renunciation. All flesh, all splendour to earth again, waste matter worthy of holding it. Into the shapeless mass which never cries out.

1996-02-28T18:28:00.000-08:00

February 28

Seeing things dry and sharply etched. Pine trees full of the Prussian past. Cherished notions of the quantifiable, the innards of the hard-tuned instrument, betrayed, disinherited from the fictive perspective by its origins in bourgeois science, the god that made iron grow, submit to orders and connect to sites injected into every mouth. The paranoiac, miraculous technocratic resonances derived from ideology. Whenever attention wavers. Self-consciousness standing aside, drawing figures in the air because there is silence on the corrugated edge of existence and its collaterals. Some realm removed to the cellar in the evening for purposes of documentation. A home for the blind summoned to a rehearsal, across the fields like frightened hares, flashlights in the darkness, as on the stage. The figures proceed from one building-site to another, with less rapport than a bleeding rabbit. Hypocrisy makes its entry into a neighboring territory, while confession is tortured, and confesses dramatically.

The result is a language difficult to learn, becomes this strange document, abstractions as ashes in the mouths of those who thirst for vengeance. The same old song since the days of the last remaining body. A persistence so great, beginning with isolation confounded in her longing for righteousness.

I have recorded this because it is the unspeakable flesh in contempt of this immense burden of work. More than the mere evocation of the inconceivable (nature) thrown up around the subject. Human bones displayed in public places under medieval allegories. The atmosphere of the times found in the peculiar language, the highly-complicated form of the proposition, the usual bravura and sacrifice to an old thousand-voiced monster which rattles the flimsy costumes and moveable sets, leaving behind a ruined garden of the luckless, the idle, and the thousand other miseries.

Projecting the world with lighting and stage hands, as if born to the trade.

All this and more, verging on maudlin, as an expectant occupation which enables progress and setbacks, as a whispered word reveals no satisfactory resting place.

1996-02-27T18:25:00.000-08:00

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.

1996-02-26T18:24:00.000-08:00

February 26

Lost by all accounts in a scattered dream of the absolute in motion. Poised obliquely, ready for flight, perservering in weightlessness, meaning to continue towards a barely-perceptible stress on the last word. Justice, justice, justice, the thinnest of smiles. To murmur, just before she sank, in league with the floor, striving to expunge what was left, like a garden after a storm.

Begin with the basic positions: meager, without a legal inheritance, something ethereal scattered into alleys between old apartment buildings, the dry remnants of belated profits from war supplies. These worthless objects might find favor in homage to their distinctive language that grew less and less ornate, colors without method in rich houses without tradition. No music necessary in streets bounded by lines of light. Then the spectre of blindness and perhaps the inscrutable taste of guilt.

All this is going on in the open plain between here today and gone tomorrow.

On earth there is winter. Darkness falling on the worn network, the shapes and massive forms of a world, a huge abandoned workshop, any site abandoned, dwindled to leftovers. The shipyard and the railroad-car factory where cattle-dealers and wine-merchants take their meals. These most ambiguous of countries, all torn to bits, nothing but trenches, all the scarecrows dispersing to the vicinity of the hastily-abandoned, and come to nothing, and returned without a word to their daily chores, the thud of falling bodies, cries of fright that have turned to stone and plunged downward, witness to an underground source. Vision, looming earthward, obviously dead. Mathematics going into business with an oak coffin as a guide to statesmanship. Necessary to make one’s way everyday through the array of blind-eyed hovels, clamouring like dead men in the hands of Pharaoh. There is no sound in words buried with full honors. All the world a brothel, corrosive, narcotic and septic, each different variety of paralysis and ulcer penetratingly and inescapably weapons speaking for us all, some propitiation for all these vices and all this life.

Time, enormous, alone, no protection against it. The gravediggers raise their spades and, turning, soldier-fashion, march off to beat against the closed cemetery gates. The relatives of the dead, pushing their little carts down a cheerless, stony highway to register for such work as they (we) are capable of. Living with a vague hope, that we should live well in the intervals we are given, unworthy as we are of living our lives to the end.

To steer the paralytic’s belligerent carriage at random, describing circles, plunging across a ploughed field where no paths lead. A heavy, obscure grief sowed in dry ground. A pallid sun rose over a small wood fire, swept over the petrified and groaning herd. Houses torn apart by shells lay like dead horses in the unspeakably sorrowful road, where faded wreaths lay about. Liturgical texts and phenomenology have left the house of bondage and are now pining away in this desert, uniformed, beflagged, sunlit, world-shattering, still the immature children of the world’s agony, wallowing in business-like bliss, gazes fastened fanatically on some invisible, joyless rules that rule the world. When to work, when to rest, even right into their graves.

Boards for a new coffin, the ruinous and incomprehensible allegories and parables drag us sleeping through the unharvested fields. In the darkness, the orchestra plays the overture to the third act, “goodbye to us all,” without stopping for breath. The stage is far away, frozen in silence, and ineffably beautiful.

1996-02-25T18:20:00.000-08:00

February 25

A few words by the roadside fires burning, the stubborn path and mandate of the propagandist, to call this world into question. The open door leading out of the brilliant light and colorful society into nothingness, into desire and inconsolable grief. The long trip through the water in which the corpse has been washed. Secret language giving new names to the muddled interior, upset over the whole world left alive. A region of plains, abysses and difficulties, entirely lacking the right system, for extinction or return. Flushed, beautiful, morbid, blind as ever. Invention, a refined instrument, stood there in the eighteenth century. Philosophy sang, fell silent, played according to the rules, flowed on wordlessly to some forgotten station of the inexhaustible autumn in the heart, while all the rest hung swaying beneath the coffin with burning eyes. Away into the next century, to strike a flame deep in the woods slantwise, sending out light over the whole field, and over the dust of the village square. Of the town violently reminded of who has already once (more than once) been buried. No more than six feet of earth in the graveyard between Babylon and Berlin. A wealth of anecdotes of sometimes almost unbearable melancholy. Too much dust and rain out of every furrow. Enough to drown in. The bitter smell of leaves brewed in the dark German-Polish woods. In the open meadow stands the factory, shimmering. Electric lights burning, black plumes out of the endless forest.

Nightmares that have awakened and endured years in a bare stone chamber. Living like a suicide in the midst of millions, tugged step by step through the beet fields, heads bent, with all our wheat and no customs. Remained in the world to climb back across the fence with which the whole thing started. The soundless laughter coming nearer behind birches and beeches on the mounds and ridges. This unpeopled landscape is hidden in nonchalant movements of the hand, dead birds falling into the sea, blossoms half-shut. Torches bloom like roses groping over the earth, already burning and the orchestra playing and passion rules the universe.

The world returns to dust. Dirty, lilac-colored, dead. Consumed, and bled away. The earth in a dream and full of darkness. Down again, and up again and down, this idiotic succession of one thing after another. Of slow ruination, of arson, of shots fired in the night. Very late all staircases creak, a scarcely-audible song from a forced slaughtering. Embattled women still linger, walking on blood-stained feathers on the earth that is moving nowhere. Children in their sorrow condemned to stand there forever in the agonizing intervals of stupid infirmity. The paperweight again, the fist, the hasty greedy notation of the instant, analyzed in schools. Bent forward and half dead, stunned by verses, sobbing, hemmed in by the shadowy walls, among all these figures in a densely-populated unknown street. The same tone a hundred times, stirred by pictures of the tomb, of flowers, tiny flags on submerged masts. Uncertainty remains, making it impossible to recognize the smell of bone glue beneath the tapping of canes and umbrellas. Death seems to be a little speech that was bound to occur, swift, dry, down to earth, aligns the flags and smoothes out the false notes, halts and distributes more sawdust beneath the body, last year’s snows at certain points in the refrain. The finished machine howls with a dark voice that grows hoarse, drags the whole world to zenith in the gleaming sky.

Agitated, tranquilized, the capture of strange birds. The factory, the railroad, the animals left in the dusty suburb. All the resignation of the world given up for lost. No end to man’s tears and woman’s blood. Scorched by unsociable passions. Clenched fists, chunks of iron. Her answer would be unbearable, a rhymeless novel piled out of the endless mechanical music onto the ground after a long ride. Allusions to actions inscribing brazen figures of inflamed old women flying on in front in pursuit of their banners. Each figure has its own price. Smile and kiss the bruised flesh. Moving a passionless head so as not to see the world spread out, dropped out of the blue, suddenly deleted at the last pages, disappeared under her body. Beneath an ambiguous protection in the vicinity of the dangerous.

Vanished, returned. Ossified, clean as a body placed under glass. Eating in silence under the darkness of trees. All awareness of the possible abandoned. Through the darkness, barefooted, straight through the heart of the earth to the home of illusion, our old Europe.

Into the empty apartment, without changing.

An appropriate lapse of time to disappoint poor girls.

The twilight of the ghetto made the beginnings more mysteriously involved. Time to pieces, death to pieces. Precious utensils from an altar. Earth as a fixed disk loosening its arc lamps and flagpoles upon our graves. Importance and consequence seek their homeward path to a mass grave. Mouths agape at the fantastic tale - because they are so different? Nothing to corroborate this, not a document to submit to the court, more in nature of a warning, whispered, murmured, muttered between the factory and the rails, building it on the bones of small children, impregnated with the smell of leeks and Jewish destiny. Mere scribbles in the margin of the real book. Like raindrops in the leaves.

Opening another old bottle. Let this foreigner talk. A reflection of radiation and allure in dark wine. An echo, a demand clung fast to the coarse and fragmentary language of timorousness in its ardent cup. Tower, arsenal, prayer-book, mysterious islands on white paper ground. All the constellations and seasons in silent choreography. Sky extinguished, flags drowned, everything save tears vanishing in some fervid hour.

Nothing to give in return for all this measureless magnificence. Heart so inured to stubborn resistence to the old tenacious habit, this universe, a collector, earth, rock, leaves, roots, every possible thing in their old cases lined with satin, hung motionless in all the rooms with pictures, papers, books, letters. Everything occupied, vanished again into the other, reading to much upon the object in its desolate landscape. The purely chemical tendency to march by the figures, salute, march by, salute, march by as though possessed, overstrung by every longing.

Sophisticated man of our late age, risen on the daily performance, as the adornment of the world. Mechanical orphans on the stage, flung out of the round of ordinary life with a forged passport, dispersed and untrained, without a history and catapulted out of nowhere onto the struggling shore where fiddle and music lay with the sweetness of self-destruction and gypsy oblivion.

By that shore, in a torn net, scythes, nails, leather and accordians, blackened by the smoke of centuries. A litter of boxes with skulls silhouetted like shadows against the snow around the morgue and police stations, their slender spires turning slowly in the shadowy and confused past.

The cinder track casts a long shadow imperturbably and vertically from the chimney. Motionless in the falling snow. This is the sorrow of the Nibelungen, lines drawn, scores kept, victors cheered in suburbs iced over with yellow urine. Sad, detached selves entangled in the forbidding spokes. Something loose and lifeless in a house of Finland granite.

How slow the acquisition of things one needs to know.

Too slow in following to prevent the barrel-fever that rises through the darkness with a ferocity now impossible to describe, collapses to the floor and begins to cut into the indescribable, looking for the mechanism inside us. Ruthlessly, as though forever impossible to break open against moorings. Returning loudly, plummeting onto the floor, under the ceiling and down to the nineteenth century, calling the laws of gravity into question. Many traditions and sanctuaries destroyed, extinguished in the softened and passionate condition. A dangerously productive environment. Freedom from the object. No lights, no merry-go-round, a sloping shore down to a funeral in the third act. A strange procession, the girls in order, functioning, marching into the birch woods darkening on both sides. Breathing their warm breath through black masks, approaching the iron temple in the snow, in utter silence, Gutenberg’s iron book burning in their open mouths.

The fading sky. All that dies. The line and the line’s line, over the snow and leaving no trace.

To burn in one of those magnificent graves of a human heart in the land of roses.

A piece of it for myself, a tiny piece.

1996-02-24T18:18:00.000-08:00

February 24

The days and then the weeks of blindness, brimming so full of the correction of lies and their reverberations. Endless tale, endless. More horrible than the event itself. More merciful than deserved. Scattered flowers and aromatic decomposition. Diseases, night, the penury of goods and substances comforting the fallen woman.

My voice has crossed the line. Heart to a loveless cynic being eased aboard the train. Guilt about such acts a comfort in black days. Cruel, but not unfamiliar. To burn from the inside outward. What is extracted from mines, torn away and washes the dead. The broken teeth and polished boots. Already half-lost honor pursued by hatred and overtaken, more of a coward than anything else.

Breath in irons. No tongue flutters in the mouth-cavern gently just above the open book. A smooth and weightless death’s head, a covering-over of scattered relics, a hovering over corpses, the old atavistic reflex, as at the end of a long journey to the city and then to the prison, the terminus of the narrow-guage line.

Get up, light the fire, and make them breakfast. Serve them cabbage soup when they stagger from the train onto the disturbed earth, the stars hollow and weighed down. A flock of birds, and darkness crowning forests, mountains, borders with interchanged or telescoped details. The movements of the living like wedding rings in the darkness, taken up their beds and walked onward slowly, eyes averted onto the ground, so heaped with papers, from beneath which protruded pale steel gleaming. This excursion through the sewer, with the paintings and grand pianos, other precious items, so carefully packed for just such an emergency. Scraps of her childhood lessons, education and loyalty, her one friend in dark days, roads fizzled out. As dangerous to take them back.

There are windowless rooms available.

This selfish prayer would adjust, by a fraction, the ashes in the wheelbarrows, the movements of the living. Apocalypse and ornament in one. The pallbearer’s stumbling is an omen, a human, understandable sound stretched out on a voiceless ecstasy, circling mournfully in the dense expanses, only one strand in a universal stream. From the beginning the whole story hovering over the vestiges, a smoke that falls to the ground in the middle of the civil population, white figures burned, drowned and reburied in stone and rotten wood. Lay down on a ragged bed inserted into the masonry at regular intervals. Possible to wake from them, converted and unconverted, smiling sadly, to be ushered into an endless extent, like an avenue through clearings in a scrub pine forest, converging into the soothing embrace of the tomb of sweet air.

To hear sounds in the silence, ambushes about our hearts, and trees like naked corpses amid white fields. Sullen, refusing, as when a peasant becomes a customer in the effort to survive.

Night arches over a dying man, surprised by that failure.

1996-02-23T18:16:00.000-08:00

February 23

A life of heroes, of strength and esprit. A theoretical construct that crumbles at the slightest opportunity, whatever the risk. A false story to allay the beginnings of an obsession, forms of self-realization, the parasite that penetrates them in a desperate attempt to remain physically present. To gain access to the secrets in others, by denouncing their own sense of coherence.

The long hold of that obsession, something salted and hard out of a moment-to-moment apprehension, a brief, meaningless and carnal mechanism, a means of identifying what might happen or what had happened. Logically and chronologically moving as if their economic state were the only world which mattered. A line of thought as narrow as the railway, it can and will produce a whole system of bourgeois representations, a blurred reproduction of the mysterious, trapped in iron, hidden from their eyes.

Carried swiftly through the night, the wandering onlooker in a landscape located in a gesture of destruction of the true values of the world within us, images and treasures we have lost, the delimiting defense of boundaries across the whole spectrum of representations, experience, emotion and history diluted by travelling the route normally taken. The noise of trucks washed with the moisture of the morning dew. The gravelled edge of physical decline absorbs all the heat of day as a series of bargains (years.) An unhappy, unnecessary visit and a grim end, with just one short song for the febrile homeland, tossing and turning as dawn glimmers through Dresden’s ruins.

The word comes, spills itself incessantly, blood and wine drenching the earth, a sordid simplicity of objects, people, materials, elements, the occult public festival of a completed apocalypse. To pile up bodies which would find their freedom there in the obscene and absurd liturgical ordeals of secular and premeditated magic, the anatomical logic of daily-repeated bourgeois inertia.

Trembling hands drop the candle trying to recapture habits of feeling, searching for all the absent clothes in the closets as if recalling the inhabitants of the habits and fears of Europe, the lists of those destined for and capable of hard work. The grass itself stops growing, searching for a gateway to the world. Hard labor made human, ignorant as ever of its true movement, that this world does not exist, and that this work is burnt in this superior, impossible possession.

The sea covered with ice and the mutilating device. The burning waterfront across the water. The rumbling of the train along the far end of the earth. To contain the blood there for a moment above the ground in a gentle torpor, induced to perpetuate those boundless evenings of our wandering, the nothingness we are clothed in. Of the wildness of fields beneath the weight of the saddle. The whole world files past, small whitish heaps in the darkness, witnessed so many times. One embarks as on a train, elected and worshipped by absence that passes and overwhelms. A misty figure giving comfort with an ominous whistle. Psychology as if with a knife depicts just enough sinister forms, can no longer contain atrocity, or believe in it. The body of the dreaming sleeper nourished into existence by it for centuries, against the mind. Habitat, the motive, still lingered in them in the peculiar way which conveys loneliness bearable when necessity demands.

To sing the train into light, they remained uncertainly on the pavement, shuttered and half-derelict, nothing in common, not even memories. Benign figures, like bells coupling to make the world match her movements and her gestures, which can no longer contain the hideous dilation of the heart.

A few poppies, gently scattered in monumental clusters, scarlet as radishes, heretical and intoxicating as scenery on a stage. She has let herself be dragged about in a strange night land in its autumn as surely as obedience to the wisdom of their old language, whose core, eaten away, would want something like ashes in every useless direction.

Rain outside, and flowers. Without knowing why.

Nothing, nothing given. Just the view from the window, the road, the brilliant sky, the sleeping swan and falling blade, her vanity and voice in fiery pillars of dust. Impossible to distinguish the common colors of things, except darkness and some broken glass when the atmosphere and the streets flowed in submissive streams to the swarming of bones. Of baggage on a train.

And in the forest we await the end, ashamed for the earth. To undress and bathe with night as a nimbus, with fire the prison of the body. Our weary way with resonance and tears, utterly exhausted, up the slope right into the very heart of it, whatever condition awaits the dead.

1996-02-22T18:13:00.000-08:00

February 22

Dangerous to fragmentize history in an effort to rebuke the horror of deformity, the behavior of abject and depraved men, neurotic individuals within the large mass. Human beings and their science with its instruments of grief and anguish speak to us in a sea of cowardice, denying history. The railway and a line of fire against a waste of waters, seen through a window of pursuits and captures, the impatience of rough hands on a gothic virgin, occupied with the unutterable desire which drives us, swept away with the victory of the empirical. Paths of victory driven through the crack between flesh, and through eccentricities of an endless variety mitigated if only for a few minutes by scientific curiosity. Pleasure is the hangman. The soundless flight of upright bodies.

To the place of execution there came powdered faces and reddened lips which murmur their lost terrors. Witness to the reverence of infinite stupefaction. More land, then the sea. Punishment for having been punished.

Footsteps and voices, the usual phrases, their bits scattered. The trap door by night to the cemeteries. The scattering, wandering lights falling aside after having signalled. Hard accretions of all sorts standing in fire, howling. Threads broken and knots tied. The future lost in the events.

To prolong these states of detachment. That all may be lost forever. The old project once more. Industry, cunning and loneliness in foreign places and without possessions. Convictions, discrepancies and incoherences, those symptoms of personality, the usual sinks, tables, cages and glass tanks, the clanking of the anchor chain against a towering wall of concrete that blinds us. Silk streamers thrown into the eyes. Philosophy, always accumulating, stumbling up and on over the mouths of sunken tunnels not dark enough to enter.

Emotion is worn smooth, submerged. Identity all bone and dangerous. Amorphous and wandering. A dispersion into an incoherent flood of words, immigrants themselves, a rising and falling chorus of shadows and expanses emerging from the shadows, floating for a moment and then sinking in the direction of the darkness, to stretch the night and fill it, pilotless, tender, ravished in the shadows in a complicated embrace.

Then a combination of words which would startle, and the name of the artist in silence as she searched back and forth with her fingers for only a moment before the engineer assigned to these regions drives the needle into the flesh. The chemical and the personal, their bayonets red with blood.

Manifestations of obedience to a long withering.

A book of poems and a pair of boots together, sitting on the edge of a hard bench in a public room. The heavy dark furnishings clutch to themselves the familiar routine, the classic piece of bread. A great many foolish things. The number of sentences which now lie deep on every scene, lodged at the center, embedded in a substance of repeated moments. Remedial action for the future salvaged from the ruins of administration. Truth, this misadventure, as a miner of cemeteries. As pretext and accompaniment of voices, and shoes. A pair of white gloves lined up to buy tickets. Here the trains start as the earth is tossed aside onto a boulevard on which no one sets foot. Its unbroken surface no less bitter than the winter wind. No less forbidding than solitude. Solitude, anguish and an unbearable thirst. The antics of the individual at a distance, stained, corrupted, immobile. Tone and expression invoking only vile and famished faces flanked by rows of apartment buildings. Cold greetings exchanged despondently past an altar for each and every such offense. An artificial and entirely unconvincing deliverance from all the temptations and infamies practiced by man upon man. Its appeal constantly growing more fanatical, worshipped, a candle-flame in gold, blistered chimney-pots. A seduction more powerful than all the dread which has already been engulfed under an almost-undamaged catholicism all over again, the plaster figure surrounded by the barren space in the midst of all these cozy little bourgeois ruins.

No unburnt bones, no wisps of hair.

From a distance the stars were shining with a great rustling of decorum, whispering their suspicions towards the west in association with old bones and the fear of disappointment suddenly converted to objectivity, a propitiatory sign here in the old days, the epitome of countless pleasures, superstitions and indifferences, immensely flattering.

A line of poplars, while the horizon recedes, fold after fold, slowly to the end of the garden. Parched earth reveals our unsuspected organs, which endure the torments and diversions, to imagine a future in which that extremity in their bones could not be persuaded by the ruins of a substantial house.

Fruitless midnight hour, after which the sullen and quick flow of blood from the figure to the pedestal resumes her digging in a musty twilight, through a hole like the images of things more than a moment vanished. This globe, full of figures. Pillars, shadows, memorials to the fate of Europa crushed like glass splinters.

A sound like the knocking of railway cars in a siding.

To haunt the bridges, debating shadowy ideas traced through the lives of certain people in the crowd of casually-attired travellers, the relics of an army broken by silver. Some music, some wild carol descends, unbroken, monotonous, terribly as we become separate bodies in an intoxicated rage of loneliness, the consequence of violent acts, of the inevitability of hallucination fallen into bereavement. The shadow ignored for a single moment (self-discipline to the point of pain), her childhood in comparison, vanishing, twinkling, burnt on a bonfire in Berlin.

A scholar wholly absorbed by her experiences during this period, drawn irresistably to the sound of the chorus, a modern piece of some obscurity. Desire, the incompatible idea and pluckings of the fingers into darkness, looking for clues down in the tenacious mud. As if we walk in a garden. These enemies, these presences, all the accretions of mature knowledge, the hundred secret signs by which their language, like a city, closes over their bodies.

For a thousand practical reasons the charred bodies do not finish their sentences, cannot be separated. The highest and lowest in the cold earth forever. Therefore mingle funeral wreaths and the lavish gifts of consolation, that we are not responsible. The mystery of spirit that pours out into mirrors, claiming religious duties and a blameless life and freedom from intolerable knowledge. Our uniform psychic investment in the hands of abstract fathers. The whole structure designed for a burial, a reluctance to speak of what was being celebrated in the bedrooms of small shopkeepers: the radiant beauty of the successful and permanent state of war waged by capitalism, and that such things could have happened only by a slender thread of coincidence. An irregularity of the sort without a womb, the dead mistress, familiar with the language of intoxication, compulsion and pain, a sudden and shiny restoration rising to the surface, a solution which poses no analysis.

Houses and trees crumbling in mourning for the organic state. The penalty of an imperfect acquiesence and humility. Stray impulses in any writer.

To anticipate what was required, and come to the doorway on the last day, waiting to be taken away from the dream, gasping.

as if the train would cut me in two.

1996-02-21T18:11:00.000-08:00

February 21

The orthodox, always shovelling an enormous pile of human bones back into the grave, glancing at the frightful sight of the dead in order to develop habits compatible with the study of the human body. Are able to make use of ruins in a wasteland, observations from the antique names on boxes, corpses in a special room, for no other reason than this filthy anatomy, the time-consuming routine with a wide, comprehensive gesture and rather ambiguous substance. Introspection necessitates pauses as a characteristic trait. These long and often dreary reports of no strategic importance. Radios roaring in the dry climate, repeating the relevant passages so as to enhance the expression of uniformity, as with the community within the rushing train on the edge of the final statement. Suspense and distress from the ruins of an old house. Liberty, in the end, unable and at variance with a disinterested poverty, an uncertain future, scarcely broken into day.

Brush off these vapours. Solitude, wide-eyed, gently ascending the scaffold in a cloud of flies. So to the roots of toes and fingers, anything outward, visible, tangible, a lifetime surreptitiously burning pleasure from eternity. Tiptoe on the verge of fire like birds’ wings folded. Bent down with such inordinate loads, such love painfully acquired.

Remote provinces fetched up out of darkness, pale, half-dead in the smoky and intermittent light of torches as the chanting dies away to the point of silence, to the point of childishness, to the point of shame, our places in such an ossuary. That great silence enough to burn any blankness or continuity or wall and turn women and their brooms into flaking plaster on the eyelids of a small girl carried off by the great plague in every individual heart. The insoluble problem of the solitary long accustomed to playing the role, unconsolidated, incapable. World still proof against groundless faith in the light flickering as we sit pen to paper without attempting. Imagine turning over a few inches. Towards the door in a silence possessed, possessed. Earth sky as one. Toil, flesh, the infinitesimal shudder, away from the flowers, infected by their grief. On earth a winter. Earth sky body ruins.

Decay, the shadow, slants down a steep place a little breathless from wheels, bells, the cries of drunkards, violent language that is natural, engaged, something irrevocable. It is the entire congregation scattered, descended, gone back in without hesitation, the hall gaping into more rooms, more different rooms, all these different lights. Lustrous, their eyes burn with white bones and crosses as on earth attached only to the cinders and refuse of something once splendid, anything but again beautiful. Nothing to sweep away. Rain, engraving too much silence where the steep-back hills come down from one language to another, wrapped in a shroud of cloud and a waning moon cracked with the cold.

Violent patches spaced by blank voids. No more raving, no more lightning. Quiet gravity controls something left out from fear. Sunrise the purification of the land from settlement to settlement. Find it in the smallest trace of things foreseen. Yet the apparition that appears lacks bodily grace. Women shuffle to shopping. Weak limbs demanding knowledge, anguish and ambition. Instead of legs and arms. The dead uncertain in dying.

Squatting or recumbent in the middle of the night.

The ransacked world, burnished by innumerable wheels.

Stretch and touch something hard, the distance between the sequence of things, loneliness and silence, men in helmets seeing life through hollow eyes. My world, what death has done.

All those years and now the fullness that would pass for despair born from the feeling, intermittent and muffled, destroying everything, leaving ambiguous motives and ambivalent effects, the continuous labours and worries under the pretence of living like philosophers.

Every conceivable kind of observation would be the same as wanting water. Swollen, but contained. Laced together in isolation, punctually into trams, upon squares, in busses. Lay to rest the incessant newspaper in a glass shelter. A vast inheritance of experience burning up an ocean of petroleum. Ships to the sun fall like snow and are wasted. Into the heterogenous crowd only by blood.

Europe, an autopsy. It begins with machines and the advent of chemical analysis signifying the resurrection of the dead in a world of imaginary terrors. The wilder, darker violence of a century’s accumulation of wealth, enemy to human intercourse, slavery in its most brutal form. Houses guilty with light. Vice allied with a capricious virility humiliates the old compunctions and compassions. Erosion, everywhere. Back to hunger again in an old civilization with a notebook. Its stupid voice in your empty room. Isolation never deceived. The memory dwindling like burnt paper, mediocre but inordinately ambitious. Having been emptied, abandoned in the vicinity. Nothing but smoke, ashes, deceit and shame. All the modern conveniences. Metallurgy and fallacious melancholy become fashionable, staining the page with a coat of imperial paint. Clouds pass over, not involved with this pageantry. The one story to which all these phrases refer. A cart that rattles over cobblestones.

1996-02-20T18:09:00.000-08:00

February 20

Further and further down the rails, into the smoke of a street where no one passes anymore, rushing, powerless to attenuate the feudal integration of the body into interminable digressions, anecdotes which are of course interchangeable and despise the maker. Opened by a dismal conflagration, an end to power, peasants pierced by the sword. Monuments erected to perpetuate no uncertain opinions through tenacious, scrupulous, verification as an observer, seeing it in history, not burdened by too much learning. Those people, those houses, those dismal things, local geography and folklore registered and gradually sold, including the ships anchored in the most glorious of futures, for sale just like any other wares. Work is involved, but rather little of this survives, deaf to all ordinary sounds. Instead, villainy and tricks, symbols and idols submitted to a corporate body with slow thoroughness, with forgetfulness and silence all around. Their own wholly-divorced finished product continually produced in a vacuum. Such foul fabrications debasing the glorious profession not so much in theory as in practice. Plundered and burnt mouths making noises within a cultural setting. The whole ludicrous and pathetic story before a sympathetic public. A sonnet, a picture, a police state, an integral part of the wage system. The apparatus in plain sight but far away, the laboratory pleaded in word and picture. Circulated against the current centuries later. To order, to file, to check, from landing to landing. The last flood towards function. Architects, blacksmiths and shoemakers obsessed by evangelical utopias, assembling anonymous decorations under the windows. A monument to the defeated has abandoned the sweeping portrait. Victory would deprive us forever. Hollow hollow hollow hollow hollow hollow as the train rounds the hollow hollow bend.

Rise, drift, stagger and fall. The doorstep like a snowfall.

Forget Paris without any breakage, with chimneys softly outlined. Little pieces of tallow in the corner to protect me to the bitter end. Superimposed strata bearing witness to this transience. Lunatics in the midst.

In the doorway, dressed again in shadow. One of these almost-disembodied rebukes without comment. Forget for a little while all the passions that go beating about. More interested in the contents, in a dense layer of symbols, in that other world of addiction to perfect forms. In these things imagining blame for the lamentable consequences, the triumph of the victorious in theory and on the map: expressions, dress, gestures, together with a full description of the morals of a commercial clientele strangely silent, accustomed to the worst by habit. Central Europe full of good hearts, only driven into groups by the bitter cold. The exhausted, diminished blood then taking a steep plunge across the fields in darkness, with mimicry and assorted cries typical of the avid egotism in their imperial correspondence. Something out of the carnival capable of rising to such a magnificent idea to die with, pleasure recorded, and the simultaneous allegory. Letters of such authority, seeking a cogent periodization. Unceasing, ambitious, magnificent marble tomb. All the sentiment of fidelity and respectability driven to the bottom of our new bodies. A long inscription in crimson. Scarcely inhabitable. All the books and papers and clothes burning in a corner of the room. And the whole city and the sky and the heavens emptied, utterly cast down like crates from a truck, like prisoners strung out along the road. From the chronic to the acute. Turned a final corner.

Work emerges from the darkness, black and dead, now suddenly chosen, too young, the consequences only the means. Completely exhausted and convinced half-heartedly to achieve the desired result, to accomodate a more voluptuous mode of phrasing and trajectory. Printed matter and cigarette butts stopped in mid-air. The icy wind just once more to the end of the table, losing ourselves in words.

The little sounds that mouths make inside these boxes. Vox humana and the angel voices broken. No great work to disturb the fabric of our infinite precautions and cloud the fine simplicity arranged, the simple ceremony, that momentary appearance of solidity. The transmission and diffusion without change and without comment, into the interior of a picture, merely another form eclipsing the solitary and thereby made subject.

Which is broken at last by the voice. And the corpses of children dug up twenty years after a century almost absolute.

We really couldn’t expect any more than shells, bones and silence among the booted in a strange country. Hanging as we were on imperfect phrases littered with death at the hands of maniacs. Ultimate and irremediable detumescence in the circumstances of practical life. Vapors swirling among grey spires.

The door opens, terror rushes in, burning as lamps burn, a violation of its abrupt and perfectly encircling walls. Shops and houses, some buried pieces of capitals, columns or cornices shaded with grey. Night seems to linger in the darkness in silence for a little while longer. In the middle of the field, the birds gather, are in the act of landing.

White nightgowns, no lights, all of them busy with shovels. Measuring, digging, collecting. Diminishing nothing and exceeding everything, every contrivance and invention, the grinding and the steam. Introspective nature and anguished mind merge into an overwhelming image of political greatness by an act of sympathetic magic, a deeply-disturbed hypochondria more convincing than this equivocal material and artificial truth. What remains, revealed and once more hidden, or never even discovered, is the abject subject of an intimate journal expressive of bitterness and disappointment.

For a moment we see ourselves in the act of landing, like a creature dazed.

1996-02-19T18:06:00.000-08:00

February 19

The live dark garden has grown still. A sort of imperceptible injunction on specific ground. The safety of the outskirts threatened. This blurred image of the clumsy seated figure begins to darken, the contours in a glass of tea, head bent to the mysterious voices like a black tower swaying like the movements of a compass. Wounded and dead gone down together during the idle moments of existence.

The capacious boundaries of pain. Dreariest and most useless of virtues. Our unbroken will. Its instincts, its vices, its follies, untiringly, the lines without respite, with hysterical insistence, suffused with tears grown cold like an ailing heart. Persisting in the rythmn of contempt for the decisive sentence. The daily apotheosis, faithful until death to the horizon. To run in front of the engine. A response forestalled. Such preemptive phantoms. A bleached shell or a piece of broken glass. Nothing but the sun and silence, looking down the stairs with the same indifference at the already hard blue of the morning sky. The world, worn out, the notes and chords, the flowers strewn, nurses lying in the grass, singing softly under cloudless afternoons, their syllables not weighted by meaning, by the fabric of their good intentions.

Movement all over the country as though nothing had happened. The same unending day unfolding among others from the same world. Ignorance of the general situation applying the healing knife, the reign of monotony, sleep, memories, the alternation of light and darkness, a lesson in arithmetic: that the blood is not the girls’.

Bones left over from dinner, dampness shining in the black hollows. The smell of singed rags in the sacred republic, the stale atmosphere of all prisons. At home, in these surroundings, unbound, the entire family still busy in the kitchen gardens perjuring the whole of a positivistic past united forever by the miracle of fire, coming to a standstill in a field so deeply ploughed. Standing, because deprived. Immobility of the present. The quickening moisture of its twilight, the sounds of evening rising up in a small room that smells of darkness knocking four times on the door of unhappiness, to hear the murmur of its water again, and in so doing become like a child and drink the wine you won’t be given. Singlehanded, seeking death.

Who had as not yet suffered (in her body) would long ago have found a pretext. The barren soil, dented, out of muteness the secret sound. Shame for the word that had escaped. Immaculate, economical. Only the unknown one used to see everywhere. Spellbound, and rejoicing.

Whole lifetime. The burglars.

Folly enough, despondency. Axis of a mysterious rapture of first possession. The sky flowering overhead, little by little, straining towards the light. The dying sun, with vague, soft voices. Murmuring, shouting, stretching far away into the distance, to the pasture to wag their tongues, romantic gestures of that sort, to recover from the everyday brutality. Dawn and its bitter treacheries over all the world, and the sky above. A lot of nonsense for a long while in the busiest quarter of the city will go on burning, by the body and by the throat for whole days and nights, singing, weeping, into a kind of stupor in winter, and all night long, justice without limit. Gold rings and necklaces and decorations, cold earth and marionettes awaiting this hour fired with enthusiasm and the ringing of spurs, burning to serve the common cause like the passion of machinery. To come into the heritage, ransack the vaults of perished emperors, all through dire necessity (soup and hunger) violating the sad purpose of having opened the planks of the coffin. Icons defiled with excrement. The hollow onomatopoeia scattered from a lugubrious carnival, the familiar salt in our hands, mere faded schemata of misfortune. All the mysterious stagnation of memory, floating chalky white against the torment of daily servitude, the flesh of dead animals and the greed of live ones. Gotten used to our new lives, all circumstances overestimated and pored over: the business, the property, the house, acts without apparent logic, that have no more rational causes than sunsets, blood, mud and ashes. It grinds lower than any earthly depth, while the sun follows through the morning air, less distinct, as after a drowning. A target, a bait, this savage gold. Days when nothing passes by, glorified without interruption. Now so submissive under this new rule, the psychiatrist, deeply concerned with the future, by the regular turning of drugs from their strange boxes. Anything other than those rare moments, spaces which separate something down below that bends dangerously, without regulation. Less trigonometry and a bit more ardour.

Hearts of varying sizes abandon the cemetery, make their way along the mouth, and so on, completely transparent but unable to compose one word. Reduced to sitting riveted and motionless, the long, drawn-out siege. Long enough to live through, maybe.

Half-asleep, taking the distant sounds with them.

A touching transience and then a settled and sublime evocation, spirit detected within this guise, a kind of pedigree described and pictured in books, becomes the model for the unexpected. Sparrows in every gutter. To celebrate the limit, the false memories planted like a nail in the reddening sky, the half-curtains and the breath. So far as to deprive the dead of their silence and immobility.

One last time the echo repeats, women’s voices, a little out of tune, old and intent on fatality, instantly widespread. Insisting on intelligence, the infernal obscene pride in every sort of entertainment, dementia and adventure, beast without heart and without restraint. An obsession with civilization in their interminable wanderings, insisting on impressive machines and contraptions, for all origins are fire and steam.

Delirium finds no difficulty getting back there to this tangle. Succumbing to old habit, brooding on the terrestrial globe.

The streetcars cluster, bringing back logic, which is really no help in the conversational vacuum.

As a last resort, reluctantly, melancholics assembled for the purpose of constructing effective scarecrows to get through certain nights by stubborn silence. The usual dwelling-place of the heart.

In the end the streets become softer and softer under unhealthy white clouds, the death-song of iridescent prophecy. As a consolation, this making of figures, this game beyond words. Anonymous, nothing signified. Slowly the denizens end by believing in it. Death, the devaluation. Every possible device to scatter the birds.

1996-02-18T18:02:00.000-08:00

February 18

An unfamiliar station. Alien, dreary and meaningless. The darkening water, many years for the world and dim shapes to decipher, ordinary hateful things and systems, books and ink, attenuated, passed harmlessly, leaving each person on the road. No longings, no forebodings. Hatred evaporated and was followed by the earth itself, every bit of iron consecrated to the memory not having been imagined. To watch real nature, out of fear, as an object lesson. To pass by their ruined city in astonishment, scavengers accustomed to the cultural prohibition abundantly evident in the form, the manner and language of a world, all lies, apologies and farces, the whole terrible course of things smeared on the shuttered doors and windows. Broken shards, the bare frame, just living stinking skeletons.

Just buried, in the end. Frightened in one corner. Dropped, one might have thought. Impelled to reach the center of leaving all the time. Thrusting an obsequious hand into the charged and hostile atmosphere. Into the thin instant of possibility. Forward, to the barricades again to rescue us from the night, to be added to the fires, to find some permanent occupation to sustain oneself in great and private danger with neither the language nor belief in its possibility.

To our relocation peacefully, shut and turned inwards, propelled to the cities and towns, into the same oblivion. Led back into that world voicelessly, slave-laborers and prisoners half-forgotten after a day or two on the train. Tenuous clouds, melancholy being sheltered and riding under no end of sky, an entire life for years, all the sounds of a settled land. Nothing but heavy spirits under bitter winter weather, we met, debated and argued consistently in a new tongue (the admittedly broad schooling), repeatedly discarding and regaining conversation out of the general chatter, scattering the coals as if searching for the light’s end. The way we would all survive no closer to an answer.

Great clouds like beggars leaning over the enclosure. A brief spy’s look into just one province within, closed, behind the tall iron, a stethoscope against the wall, against the buried shapes that dwell, familiar, in the room. Here again was the world, just a chalk line and the air, gently crumbling, adorned by the moon and the electric lanterns, bright scraps, snow before the gate and stones to keep men warm in the lunatic opera of night. The empty street shivers across an abyss in a trance. Bone by bone, how the atom fell, torrid symbol. Very useful as a connecting abstract obscenity of the dumb wall. Memory like an old tune, the bodiless campaign to establish subsequent lines and sentences, something between us for a moment. Face to face after a life of death. Symbol and revelation and the proper things no longer proper.

No pictures, no mirror.

Only tired and mistuned strings, turning, hungry, home.

Time to take it home once more, the courtyard in the middle of these speeches. The last wall of a burned and collapsed house as remote as bravery. Every lived moment in its calculations around certain fixed points crushed to powder on the rails.

Girls to women softly raised, deliberately into the abyss, water and a few crumbs under new heroes. Names that lost all meaning in the revolution which burst afterwards, horrid stanzas by the sides of roads, the mere sight of men in the doorway, and publish a lot of nonsense: a particular nation at a particular period, flags on the chimney-stacks saluted by apparitions, chimney-sweepers come to dust. The heavens stripped into solitude and the outer darkness, the subtle cargoes lie hunched between barbarian incidentals, a roof overhead, hot black coffee and juniper liqueur. Blankets lay ready, and flowers fallen and frozen, secretly hoping but gravely injured. Until a kind of paralysis descends without a destination. Lock it in the grave and magnetize the sea. Too tawdry, grace, for such dark a day. Yet in the isolation dwelling behind everything, the simplest matters again, the accursed, contrary pleasure in fulfilling some duty, some plan. Divided feelings, astonished, diminishing and giving way. The slow exchange of hope for passive astonishment at the trees above, a bit of empty sky. Minor ripples on the surface of the adjoining, invisible, apathetic, ruined life. In the same way, the slow years exhale. Recollections of empire repressed, buried. Speech, plummetting, strains and disappears again, devoured by the wish, and all the catastrophes.

In the wooden houses nothing has changed, music and bright banners and a warm fire. No scruples and no hesitation. A tiresome swindle and no more. Two horses, decent clothes and a wagon, and down to sleep without having eaten. The sweetness of meditated rancor presiding over them without improving on anything, a muted accompaniement to all that assembly of exultant and simple-minded swaggering array, these monstrous family portraits, this seditious and evasive history, the distant and wearisome ringing of bells. Heads like guillotines turn away. A courage born of bitterness betrays us without pity. To turn and leave the home with sudden and terrible violence, mocking and summoned, speak it: the earth is smoldering, remembering human filth, fragments of the occult, human dust and ashes remembering their stolen possessions. The market, and the death of the market.

A homeless moon on the lid of a broken coffin. Around and around the echoing forever made of impotent nows. The busy shovels in our lungs. Forests of cities, forests of the dead, around us, crimson with poppies.

Waiting for the train, the longest hour, when bells stop ringing. Dry land on the other side of it.

There is nothing else.

1996-02-17T18:01:00.000-08:00

February 17

To go to bed, and be incinerated, cast away our committal to flesh among the imaginary ashes, to describe something beyond the imagination. Old engravings of flowers and seasons, and rosy blossoming houses and shop windows and village after village, tomorrow, yes, tomorrow evening before the soul resigns, silence in these shadows between two parting dreams, in the dark and swaying dawn, very weak, weeping and waving across the body-strewn grounds, walls, air, and so on, even flowers, too fragile for the weight they bore. What lay inside, to be set aside for them for failing to die. Humiliation, a sharp, inexorable familiarity, a special isolation and deepening side by side with the living, the crowds of ambulatory skeletons, inhabitants of two worlds. Eyes burnt blue. Aeroplanes shining. Naked bodies at eye level with the blood of innocent women. Bent back, head sunk, mutilated by the period, defying parentage, the sacred duties of the citizen, the instrument of punishment. Filthy language, third and fourth generations, the same words come, scolding, nothing but fragments. None of it corresponds to our surroundings, distorting the secret, dangerous thickets. The astounded somewhat criminal luminescent figures. Something, burning.

Body doing its best. Opening and closing in the mud.

1996-02-16T18:00:00.000-08:00

February 16

Ending, with all its hidden landscapes remembered as seen before, shoved down into icy water and every breath we take of the sky drifting, crushed along the tracks, steps and constellations reduced to nothing under the ground, or in my body. Succumb, so bygone, a god, unwitnessed.

1996-02-15T17:59:00.000-08:00

February 15

No inclination for the world. No story, of course, after such desertion. The ignorant sky in Prussia, more opulent when silence falls, into such brightness, the row of windows, the sea, all along the track, any break or lull. Trapped in the same murmur, flowing, restless sky, still greedy for the ash.

Another evening. All happens in an instant and is sustained, banishing the atmosphere between the flowers, how weak and deadly calm at the heart of that obscure inexplicable space. The vacancy is tempting to those who act and those who think. To everyone, given the same circumstances, the reasons or combinations thereof, still capable of producing labor, to subjugate our higher purposes, to sacrifice what is visible, and perhaps the integrity of the character. The same things recur, concentrated now on the physical, on the materiality that has vanished for lack of concrete evidence. These dry winter months bear witness to this utter trace in the guise of something else, in the language employed, the relevant literature of illness. Severe limits on testimony.

The enormous broken echo of the repressed language of bodies, of sorrow. The dead, still forgiving, generate a long and bitter last gleam on the river. A foreshadowing of the general line. Silent, refusing, women assembled in that flesh or in another, to journey to themselves, or be taken to themselves. To the way out.

The same things recur, then little, then nothing. Old in vain.

Call down any sort of punishment.

To answer simply, without overtones. To recede into the rest, but faintly defiant. Permanently to have come to an end.

1996-02-11T17:58:00.000-08:00

February 11

The precarious distances of these intensities. Long pauses between them.

So many silly things. A comfortable bed, a library, a carriage, every luxury. A thousand little services, with every sign. The scraps of silk which fell. Such small anxieties wherever possible. Corrupted subjects described as evasions. Experience the formal subversion of the historical imagination. Circle of light on the ceiling. Language irradiated. The glare of the sky and the road. A liaison of suspicion and innocence, swung back, revealing nothing. Satisfied with the real as a point of order, a gesture of sympathy. Something akin to affection. A servile relationship existing in point of fact, one day of wood-carrying, one day of almost animal calm, one life as good as another there on the ground. Everything a thousand times better, already accomplished, certain, now a little higher in the sky, up to the hills next to the sky, rising like flowers blossoming out, continuous, mathematical, crossing and recrossing freely through the medium of commonplaces.

Past the front of the box, making signs to the soldier.

Unoccupied, observed. A kind of sad relief.

Utter indifference of the reader.

Such a waste of talent.

1996-02-10T17:57:00.000-08:00

Feb. 10

Shadows, in a bright light, as if they were made of glass. Peripheral figures, those absent no longer touched, nor language exist. A consequence of the rupturing, in a place other than silence. Nothing to be desired. Confined to breaking up. Moving away. The fine sentiments, not to go go further, will disappear as well. The present, in trouble. One of those inexplicable things that has no infinitive. The whole mystery of the form of value dissolving everything and dying.

If we clasp one new molecular interpretation to the other in order to revive the production of the perceptual entity, an inhabitant of the same undifferentiated regions, reorganized in ways that make any identification of the links between them only two caresses among many. Even these innocent pleasures saturated by the wide waters. The forms of contact necessary to destroy them, to cathect the body’s periphery, describing and conceptualizing body processes in torture as an immediate and precise explanation, the core complex of all normal, permanent compulsions to affirm the attraction of the forbidden history of abomination.

Ecstasy at the sight of blood above the forest. Air, virgin soil, natural meadows, what is displayed. The victim’s field of vision remains persistently hidden.

A citizen of the world in the middle of the street, with carriages passing on either side.

1996-02-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

February 9

Shostakovich. String quartet number two. Over and over and over and over.

“at a great distance with their clear vision.”

Whose clear vision?

1996-02-08T17:54:00.000-08:00

February 8

Indolent, unconscious, powerful young men, aware that action is demanded. Naked, cigars high in the air, their attention caught (amid the general indifference) by the swarms of people calling out, hanging from their watch-chains. A poignant shadow falls, tossed down, thrown sky-high, scattering women.

A quite specific form of male community. By the end of the sixteenth century are not in real life but rather it is this constant error, the word produced by these men and found in all forms, have invented more stories than the millenarians, their purity of mind there, trying, no doubt, to muster field labor and the applause of liberal cretins throughout Europe, to say “yes” without ever stopping, to facilitate its own evasion, the same blind eagerness for plunder torn up avidly by the roots, the living force. An hour for breakfast and an hour for dinner, repeating the same formulas over and over again. Those who cannot or will not take care of themselves. And now, gentlemen, farewell, and may we meet again in yonder better world, in the warm and pure moral atmosphere of the factory, with the dimmed eyes, the lolling tongue, with the hands clasped, as punishment. But (think of the Oxford professor) not before the false conclusions of the original discovery, eyes turned to works of nature frozen in a mask of rejection. This passivity of man is real activity. Like Oedipus he saw two suns. Two great blue stars, hills of black coal, grey ashes in a burnt-out grate.

The uncomfortable region derives explicitly from this point. The thing that you represent face to face with me has no heart in its breast. That which seems to throb there, surrounded, is my own heart beating, unable to do so without the most painful sensation. Long tendrils with white roots reaching down into the stomach and intestines. Roots that remain embedded. Time, language, tools and weapons simultaneously present in all habitats in their full vigor, their destructive potential. That all plagues are related, repeatedly and endlessly reproduced. Violins, crucifixes, hammers. All forms innately familiar. Ghosts pinned under heavy stone. Wrists extended for the handcuffs. Large numbers of the dead, tethered and given permanent shape, pale under the lamp and the knife, the blade condensed in its gleam, the brilliant cold shroud.

The air like an old membrane suffering from a new disease, residue of an elevated state. The poisonous kingdom. Desire and its attractions, stunning brain-orchids growing over dead eyes, over the body until the subject, the paler flower under glass, something confined for centuries under a bell jar, sloughs off one organ after another, organs squandered and divided, already occupied, gesturing and colliding in the atmosphere, transformed by the market, a diary for a worn-out world dislocated under the scalpel. My mouth in this fine text, extinguished, inundated, inescapably immersed in blood, sunk into the flesh of it completely, a final solution to the language problem. The mind, ie. the patient, being forced through the coffin, dismissed and returned, not to surpass this sordid level, those abysms consciousness rediscovers, the smell of mammals right out of the clear blue sky, perfect for burning. So that their bodies finally melt into light.

The survivors pass through fog, cross voids, ground buried deep within, cross over the whole lie of the inward body. Over the body until the subject dominates the spirit of the dead, who have themselves been drained dry by the psychic ecstasy of survival, the duplicitous ideology that prevents defense against any further hybridization into immutable biological molds. Grief, apathy and death conveying a limited immunity, an anatomy under the collar of law, beyond the distress of their limbs. No joined hands. No raised cigars.

The smell of cinders in the cellar. The whole sadistic machinery of crime ornamented with the obligatory circumstantial coating of gold. The mummification of blood with hollow walls and windows, in isolation, as personal disaster and all possible annihilation, encoded, and for this evasion, constraint, embrace, pain forms the entrance, makes the necessary gesture which saves ineradicable cowards. Out alone in the evening stamping feet under strange lighting, in search of the refinements and familiarities of this etiquette, an approximate definition of place, to pierce the facade. The house, all too soon, a hollow form, ultimately familiar. The dawn one with the dead of night.

1996-02-07T17:53:00.000-08:00

February 7

The night sky grows dim above the trees and streetlamps. Pigeons and dark courtyards. Lines seen, the geometry and monotony of colors after a night without sleep. This erosion subverts and perverts the breath, bare stars diminished, an impossible identification withdraws to make way for the body, and all the consequences in the senses, affects flesh and coincides with it. More subtle, more furious, more desperate, despair and blood in the sensory field. The rattling of plates and silverware with furtive gestures, the glow and accumulation of the elements, endeavouring to compose an impossible regeneration of the total subject without space. Bits and pieces of the sentence. Mathematical mask of roses. The whiteness of the bandage. Language, the peculiar little noise. A watery film over the graves down at the harbor. Aesthetics as history, for example, into the darkness of the entryway, muttering incoherently. These appliances, invented devices for filling up the crevices, shopkeepers and cats, bending underneath the weight of such an extraordinary array. Abolition subject to coherence arouses the thoughtless into uncertainty, space begins, the sound of a bell ringing inside an empty building. And the stupid law which follows. The unlit world where the leaf rots reinstalled in the absolute, rendered impossible, fundamental, absolute and terrible. The smell of flowers on the night air, the wintry heart of the world, the dialectic relativity of sensation torn from the forest and the forest yields a paradise all prepared for this ghoul. Tool, mouth and breast, down on us heavier than ever. The carnal fiction of translation, the rapture of ideology. My collection of valuable observations upon the true nature of human life.

An inexpressibly familiar gesture and then the conversation starts up again, atrocity as allegory.

Blood on a dark parchment announces nothing, recalls nothing. History some vast cocoon in the world of the dead. Enclosed, it expands, with the rapture of a book, too concerned with measuring its future piles of flesh in order to propitiate, in order to prevent escape. Incessantly measuring and enumerating so many phantoms, so many nullified beings, ritualized above humanity, having forever distilled the blood, as if the state were called body. A transcendent, absent, suggestive vibration, an abstract speed, slowness and degrees of all kinds, that turn and seem to occupy the total surface. The materialization of some sombre marriage with what it has pulled from the body.

Those interferences of absence and want which have at last asphyxiated the only means of saving us.

The grace to remember all the wonders by which he has resuscitated your heart. Buried beneath an animal response which has no more free play. Quiet, and a breath of dark hunched over the casket. The uncomfortable vigil. Suspended among all the forms. To sleep now, burying cowardice. The distance getting shorter and shorter every night and every morning. The silence and the bell. My way back to some strange hearth through these signatures.

In some nocturnal conflagration I am forever sleeping. An erotic world that swoons and burns to the division of all things, into which forever it continues to be plunged.

1996-02-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

February 5

And all that, and comes to nothing, against life as against death. With temptations the result of severe grief, like a cannon, an iron barrier between these painful interventions, hours and more hours, and on and on, centuries against centuries, along its periphery of remorse. Memory intended to compensate for disorder in that neighborhood, the loss of our true companions on earth in a kind of waiting in the streets of an unfamiliar city, an enormously discouraging mirage encircled by floating ashes. As if to suspect that there were more pathetic disarmed things swimming away in a bucket of blood. Hair, skin, bone, calling itself human, leaning upon each other for short moments, the only available form of release in the twilight states. In this compulsively bleeding region. Severed shapes and ragged pieces, trying to swim, fainting towards their own interior, dropping like useless ballast in uninterrupted motion, down asphalt streets and sinking houses, down into the trees, into the forest where the death-centers flare briefly, memories of ancient betrayals, tiny dreams of suffocation worn smooth by millions of footsteps, the wakes of many ships from many harbors. This violence takes place in darkness, the shadows of dark eyes under helmets, a violence promising the restitution of movement with extraordinary vigor, a seizure degenerated into the famous not-very-complicated system of gears, merely by treatment of the imagination, somehow congealing its too-mobile fibers, a constant metaphor of qualities and movements, universal substitutes for all, a single string which still vibrates, urgently wanting discharges itself. Simultaneously subordinant and dominant, outstripped in subjecting each subjugated territory to the long-awaited birth of a fleshless body. All limits have been passed, dominated and transformed in the same way, subtle predators having fainted, leaving a dead weight upon the fingers, the stench of man’s sojourn on earth. Operative metaphors penetrated, fragmented, the forest and the body buried in it moving on separate pivots, altering the pre-recorded future.

Only compromise survives. No compromise is possible.

Better to fall than voluntarily vacate the immense difficulty of an unaccustomed task. Satisfied, almost, to be appalled. Repugnant and difficult to understand, familiar objects emerge in dawn’s light. The museum of lost species. Few things are more difficult than to accept a crippling lie with the absolute certainty of words. The hills and the trees and the sea. Turned by instinct away from the site.

A reckless dose of falsehood and evasion almost immediately suppressed, remedied, by the exclusion of the actual limits, withdrawn from the recording process of perception, as a parasite of a body on the brink. Insatiable greed and ignorance as synonyms for form and maturity in a formless age. Like a bullet towards its target simply accepted as document. Exemplary in the way it maintains desire with absolute precision. The contours of the landscape marked by ceremonies, by a choir of angels (doctors were suspicious), angels only as an element in the transmission of error. The ancient moral architecture supporting itself on a war-like underground rising-up of all the bones of ignorance that pilot us along over fallen trees and piles of rubble. Pale figures in white bandages. All the tongues are falling. Nothing to stand as a barrier against the nourishing plague, only the body which is remade through the rout and ruin.

A culture built on weariness, stifled with narcotic boundaries, boundaries invested from within, whole novels of a single word, blood where milk is lacking. Closer to an immemorial fall to all that is offered: altered obscure originating configurations of useless images serving the great loss. Scraping around in a sorrow-driven form of an abundance of words. Setting out once more in their coffins across the landscape like shrapnel. The secret of the old human story in the midst of ten thousand dreams after Hegel lost all trace. Camphor from the dead in all the directions of accident.

The morning wash in cold water. The dangers of an irresolute attention, satisfaction which ruins the body, vulgar grimace in the flesh and then, reluctant, turn away. Every object resists becoming, not utility, but beauty. Any opposition, any detour, property massively in motion, to dispossess, to organize dead life, what is desired with what is hated. The sight of evil submitted to be quietly led, with observation and language only, deprived of recourse, an end to its secret, liberated but long since mastered. Long since supplanted by the public display of its organs and elements, the magnetizing fancy with which penetration will be mutual. The whole earth passing over to the dead in an iron cage, an empty power, a field of death. Enamored, impotent and silenced, harvest moves a little nearer and all the dead lie down under one sacrament, no geography but pure state itself in the streaming of pleasure. Anticipating us with transport from our familiar lifetime, baptized without choice and fitted to a frame, mere raft of flesh and bones from the cellar to the roof. Hung in clusters to see what moves them so, so as not to forget. Balloons of metal through villages of ether. The living reigned over by the dead, still reproducing the features of the human face like frost upon a window. As cool to speech as stone. Flowers to keep the eyes from going awkward. It shivers in a pillar of soot and scrapings. Nothing left but to lose the world, the problem of life outside the body, the central position at which human beings become flesh.

The sun dissolves stars out of respect for this central feeling, so tangled and its general beauty rendered as fiction superceding faith, as the agent of socially-defined power. The fits and starts, all the twitching that is seized or avenged. An exchange of territory through centuries, a minor artery to a fictitious country down a steep stairwell. A dialogue of shadows in a relationship of domination. Ignorance beheld until it bursts the heart. A point which is precisely what we are searching for. To put this world down, like a bundle, and walk away. Coals fallen from a rolling load. Flowers put away. Slate and pencil and darkness. Conscious fingers cease to pluck the stars. This beloved blame.

The empty space towards which we unfurl in a perpetual state of abdication. This overwhelming place in contact with the floor (just imagine how we are hanging on). Prostrate, amorphous, badly shoved-up as ever. This skull, by dint of shaking. Ego, in a better world. All those women who talk so well, they have travelled the mistaken route, having failed to confirm some polar expiation scarcely worth the toil. Self-preservation, here, the pleasure that is wasting its time. The laughter and the whisper, this useless body seeps away across fields, woodlands, rivers of blood which overflow from the symbiosis which inevitably structures the limits of the world, the world and the whole starry galaxy. What is living and what is dead

The mourner reaches to the sky, dissolves, and in its place blooms the not-yet-fully-born, piling stone upon stone, Attilla’s vegetation. Neither the time nor the place nor the circumstances will match these cries.

1996-02-04T17:48:00.000-08:00

February 4

A livid flower, trembling, adjusts itself to midnight, lit by phosphorous. A hurrying home of little men to the theatre for excitement, carnival time all night, always a pleasure, no limit to the marvels they’ve amassed, to the affirmation of life, to what they’ve done to men lately, that familiar species perishing in slaughterhouses and pawnshops, endless waves of useless beings drawn into the whirlpool, forced by blows, a smile, something resembling a terrible word, obliged to abandon pleasure and the needs of the flesh, forced to have exhausted the hope of intimate revelations. Passionately to abandon the place from a distance, because of the flame. The brush without the hand. The stars, obedient to the last command, go slow and banish us, evict us, expose us, put the heart abroad in spite of winter. Into the heartless and frivolous outer world in this fatal hour. Into an enthusiastic submission to the natural feverish haste of the machinery, scattered instantly into ghosts, in darkness, in a bit of light which ends in darkness, all of us drifting deeper and deeper into the night.

Hills, trees, frozen boats, ditches, vines, trinkets. The worm-eaten stones of the church, sacrificed for science. The cellar and its occupants. Incidents, stories, among others. Little cradles of shadow. Covered by science and surgery. Scars in the corneas. The drift and deposit. A whole province thus divided and given these purely physical limitations, all the foolish waste of it, natural exhaustion robbing history. Prayer an implement denied, stifled in the storm and stress and failed before the snows.

Ghosts assembled over cities at night, the tenantless palaces which in their ruins astound us. The long, naked, whistling finger of gas climbing back into the veins. The material reinstatement of the modern world. Chained and dangerous ecstasy which never ends.

It drenched the whole world.

There lay the days between, the territory not yet consumed. Till it be night no more. And then the windows failed. Condemned to see, because escape is done.

1996-02-03T17:47:00.000-08:00

February 3

These days of nothing but shop windows. The sight of the architect beggared in the marketplace. Impatience, human dignity, unsalable, crumbling away. The death agony. Persistent and very plaintive since morning. A cheap apartment and meager living. Sunrise first, then sunset, then the empty window. Without the privilege of knowing when the hills came down.

Faith cannot be replenished, chooses its own latch, like hammers falling when someone tries to swim. The sweet parade of blasphemy in unfurnished rooms. The surgeon measures the hours, does not blanch. For having exposed experience of the breathless condition.

Back to the subject. A woman gaining flesh in a poorly-heated room in winter in the middle of nowhere. The last remnant of civilized culture, half benevolent, always boring, too costly to repair. Her symptoms an excuse, a melodrama summoned from polar caskets. Such desperate acts spawning in millions, bound with violence, terrorism and conversation to the misfortunes that precede them. The heat each grave carries. The brave surrender at last, not even aware of defeat, forgo the enormous little pleasure of another ride to the bottom of things, the invisible depths of voices for awhile and then nothing.

Captivity is consciousness that ceased to feel. The ritual so small. Recognize ourselves in the procession, salute and pass, without a hint.

1996-02-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

February 2

· the tortures and devastations of life afflicted by irregular situations.

· to maintain and more or less defend. and other encumbrances.

· what people and things really look like.

· to imagine them, more or less.

· the smell of old pepper.

· an autumn light full of regrets.

1996-02-01T17:44:00.000-08:00

February 1, 1996

Life turns up in the morning, my bread and furtive destiny gathered around the window, a sense of eternity like sailors back from the new world. Back from the primeval, the black hollows with brick and damp earth. Pigeons beat the air in this tin box, they cross like a dangling wire, trees in a wild storm, flocks moving all together across streets with new clouds, now dividing the sweet milk on hard white beds, abandoning analysis altogether. To the mountains, no chance to resume something impenetrable, which increases, without pausing to wake. To the symptoms of pain everywhere. Endless paths across the fallen leaves, with bodies pursuing black plumes of sleep on this frail mattress, suspended among transparent crescents and stars of light and falling from all directions, navigating in agitation in the icy noisome fall of blood. Through cold, honor and death. Pale, muffled, mystic weakness for cemeteries. A long, complicated business, afraid of murderers and their mouths all the way down into the body at every heartbeat, throat cut, the obstacle itself having disappeared inside her. Intentions, appearances, no more. The house on fire with her obstinancy.

No escape from witnessing such horrors, except to become the rattle of the rails, the turn of a leaf at nightfall. All ceremonies are over. How empty the train. Her heavy suitcase in the corridor, at a loss, waiting. A strange sort of strength. Vindictive, compulsive, delirious. All the attributes of womanhood. The much greater intimacy of watching the spilt milk and flowers unnoticed while the storm begins. The rescuers themselves recovering, waiting tremulously around the table, intent on finishing. Together with all the old sorrows, brutalities, staring at the chalk figures, the stricken figures advancing, cadaverous, to something different, to death. To reach it in winter, after the last gas lamp, as we deserve.

Dancers and diners staring at the pauses between melodies, troubled by the element of prediction. London heaves and surges and would they care?

The same sort of life as most, falling to rot among Latin phrases on memorial brass. The dead deep down in cold storage. Some medieval light lying heavily among us. All one long day without divisions, fixed, pinioned among the diamonds of the imperial crown. Those grey arches and moaning pigeons united like lovers in water carried dimly across the lake. Men in black gowns rattle along the sea-front throwing down flowers in their own hunger, academic and meaningless. Walking and finding nothing. The frenzy for going forward, from hour to hour till the cemetery. A whole lifetime to decompose before giving in to the night.

Various attempts were made: thunderous songs at midnight, thinned out with blood and triumph. In a stumbling working-class voice, with little conviction and were soon silent. Broken chairs, dust, books and more. With scenes and tantrums and various objects in wild disorder. Passion for this hour only, before fading to silence. The end of novelty. With phrases, not the body. Sedentary occupation, always unwise. Sleep even worse. Night, and the whore of pleasure turned to give teeth to the outsides of words under the bitterest torture. Carried away irresistibly into woods and fields and steep railway cuttings, the edge of the world into nothingness, entered the black shell, bound as bodies to the horses of the phantom riders, through the vastly menacing silent night only seeemingly attached to the earth. Vacant, completed. Forged in a ring of steel, we rise, solemn, pale, soft like wax near the flame, almost broken but not quite, woken by the night bell in a small park, the remains of an old forest around the black edge of grief. A sense of something removed. The fearful pleasure that the whole earth is turning. The empty space it has left behind.

More resolute, less ambitious.

1996-01-31T13:51:00.000-08:00

January 31

To rest, to gather our food without a word. The identity of two distinct movements becomes surface for social contact. Our coarse leather skins in close proximity. Choked in it. Everything gone off. Into the warehouse, then the warehouse like pillars. Would have been forced anyway, welcome enough, it dissipates, so natural to those who know nothing.

The thermometer every two hours. Probability oddly anticipated, asking riddles as if there existed a law, every day the sirens like blocks of ice, the precision balance, the mild air with brutal violence, enjoyed as intensely as possible and at once. All the arguments of it in a different light, numerically small and politically irrelevant. It goes without saying. Different pictures stuck on different packages. Uninterrupted in the novel silence, that look of helplessness and uncertainty as to how to behave. Licking soup from bowls of snow.

To die from wounds. To carry sleepers, break stones, dig earth. To feel ourselves lying next to women. Brusquely because the emotions.

Little girls sing in laboratories all over the world. Gone by so quickly it is night again and it is snowing. A litany of portentious obscenities: gas, naphtha, vacuum, etc. Apparently extraneous orders of ideas, glittering many-coloured objects on the frozen snow. At the expense of all others.

Sabotage. Attempts to escape.

Dust and ash still rising, still rising from the chimneys, ridiculous snow drifting down around us like a halo. Abject flock.

The band began playing again. Which has broken us.

1996-01-30T13:49:00.000-08:00

January 30

A certain apathy in which any work is done, if human at all. All these serious games of the corpse, of thread and rope, from head to heart, however frightening. One might then speculate some sort of ritual division, to make a complete escape, to tear something magnificent, something sublime away from the surface, some sort of romantic inexperience, as if there were no more lies to tell. Absorption, evacuation and a restoration of normal functioning. Playing the piano and singing. To savour a yearning for melancholy on the surface of resignation and drift. To grope after a certain distraction, this exaggerated virtue, this tedious happiness. Swollen as a blacksmith’s bellows. A compulsion to blacken reams of paper. A clever, serious game of privileged idleness, of transitory and ineffectual affection, descended, come loose and floating. An arc of fire around the eddying crowd, hesitant, monotonous under the beech trees. To the shade like swimmers. Pale flowers in the evening.

The fallen world is immaterial, every barbed-wire fence a representation obtained through sight or hearing. Separate pieces incarnate in the daily presence forming the structure of the imaginary ultimate regions. Heavy boots and winter air. An undeniably accurate abstraction armed only to banish differentiation in the vulgar tongue of the inhuman, the mocking laughter and the insulting pity meeting together in the same connection, in the rigid language-shells. Vague, confusing, scientific conclusions and the serious trouble and killing. Destruction gradually extended to everything, land, wind, water, metal, every kind of refuse resulting in the large machine, the hidden organization risen to an excess that would reign in all hearts. The wanton espousal of its images or its dangers pressed against the wall, unfit for an instant’s grace. Dismal, the houses look dismal, dusted over with all occasions for further order, a precondition for those who live by rules. The voice of praise goes right on with its work, penetrates everything and nothing, makes their weapons freeze solid. Horrified spectators dealt with and punished, very carefully, no understanding of what is happening. The challenge now to stand on the street as a layer of organization, to mix human and official relations, barely-maintained scenes to soften them for almost anything to happen. A sweeping gesture directed alternately against heaven and earth. Continually to prevent unpleasant occurrences for a moment in silence, before they can hear.

Sections for use, sections for ornament, see how they disappear, actually prowling the streets, their raging frenzy, their look of the menagerie. The sight of bright clothing is tirelessly repeated. Toys, coachmen, a nurse, draperies, wallpaper, medicine bottles, the very flesh puts on a new uniform, poor fellow, hour by hour, on and on, with such rapt attention. All nonsense, sheer deception. Questions and answers taken in by the speeches of lawyers, neutralizations formed, frenzied and ranting, analogous to simultaneous competition and complicity, united to create diverse forms ignorant of the first principles. As always happens when people get settled within the limits of this relationship. A lance of old, to gleam again. A blanket but no pillow. To finish the tea and lay down. The next morning to reappear like the foolish virgin (such a small one) as a mere congelation worn away in the process, equal to zero. Morning simply familiar, hopeless, not even the whole wheel by any strange act of force having delivered them, ie. “In the heavens would be an end . . . .” Trembling hands having dropped the candle, etc.

No shortage of hazardous labour, in the snow.

One night, our last luck. Sucking survival like a sugar cube.

Like a piece of candy after surgery.

as beautiful as a statue in his gleaming boots and black uniform

when the mind leaves the body. my place to someone else, reeling.

locomotives on roofs. after cutting me open.

after cutting me open

and that all colours are abominable after purification, and that prayer laid down in tribute its blood and gold tolerant of men who enjoy an intimacy free of guilt because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. The same unwavering precision (more than compliance) the guiding force of the weak, more obvious justification difficult to answer free of sentimentality or self-indulgence. The happiness of leave-taking, of self-denial in spite of all justive and thankfulness. Heads bowed down, slavish, ridden up to the whorehouse on a dark horse, down one of those hard-packed dirt roads out behind the brick kilns and the empty lots and the foul sky and to the involutions of the dance. From one and almost to the other, a little-troubled-looking and maybe already aware. At the other end of the dance floor because of the heat and the crowd.

The rusted iron door and a cloud of ash. The wide sky and the river flowing along blindly, dancing with everyone else, astonished at the size of the surprise. Rum and scorched rags stripped of every cent and trinket (scrape some lively numbers on that violin). Scrape some fat from those brick bones. Cut the buttocks off and lock the morgue. Stumble into eternity upon their first arrival, extolling charity and belittling faith. The former plaster and draughtiness of uncertain authorship from internal evidence real yet indescribable. Thunderous noises on all sides, successive crossings, with a glance. A certain percentage praying aloud to have a dry rag and touch the electric breath. Movement, even thoughts, will separate us from the rest, a little more or a little less chaos and plenty of the ambiguity in which no thirst is suffered. As to the treasures of ships, of pirates, of idolaters. Of rivers, of wild beasts and of men.

Beyond the sundial a fig tree and beyond the fig tree a fountain. From place to place on the faith and surface of a dream, making promises into prophesies, promising nothing. Nothing, like everything, is nothing down here.

The way back takes our breath away.

1996-01-29T13:47:00.000-08:00

January 29

Villagers armed with terrible laws gathered around the blaze imagined in that wilderness, the translated faces turned away to take the necessary measurements with increasing conviction, that smell that clings to all catastrophes. Horror of men and fire. Grown men and the word “innocent.”

Intoxicated, the choir increases, in harmony and no longer yelling, more horrible the subject the better, can’t be heard, does not communicate, so it is full, and moral grandeur results. Elates us till we almost weep. The difference between despair and fear. And perish between. The motion of swooning birds. Splendid from a distance. No greater peril than those incautious beauties, fit to break the silence.

The dead, brief story, with living creatures coming and going, advancing from sorrow to sorrow, the usual third-class passengers on a Sunday train, the shuffling, dismal, discontinuous crowd, quivering flesh, jolting from place to place towards an end which is never in sight, more sun and insane trees. An insipid carnival, our destination after so many parched adventures, the corpse there at the gates, the end of all the streets in the world, nothing more in the world to hope for. Along with them like a shadow.

All the streets of that theoretical village of pavement, windows upon windows. The edifice, the generous proportions, the exact measure of nature’s requirements, which always founder, a fallacy which we enter into in the ebb and flow. Sculpture enters, revived and become imperious, as alabaster skulls, dense, plastic, uncommunicative, on the street with such perfect restraint. Cold grey stone as propagator of dangerous notions. Deformed, dwindling, engulfed in those dim countries where they go. Massed, sustained, instructed by anguish, the machines and earth all together, new science of degradation, mere trickery and deceit lying side by side with barbarian notions: cotton-spindles, steam-engines, coal, oil, etc, spilled out onto the wet ground surrounding an easy belief in such miracles, such preferences for disintegration, earth into alabaster cloud. That undrained dream of latitudes that struggles in the snow.

The sky, heavy, muffled, that fleshless chant. The machines and earth all together in the bluish half-light. Steeples drowned in amethyst. A kind of hesitation between stupor and frenzy. Smooth concrete, everything hostile, teeth of frost, this vapour that burns. Phantasms and points of pride, as skeletons, nothings, poverty with all the armoured silence. Bone-dry, ashamed, into the night with insults and brutality, reeking, loving your misery in spite of yourself.

The earth has been too much, stuns by degrees. As if, say, in consequence of the exhaustion of its bodily form the woman had broken all the forms of manifestation, only to disappear again immediately into the bones of the old fossils. Surrender without external sound. An old pleasure in the melody, rowed softer home with many a turn and thorn. Remembered, if outlived. Another night.

1996-01-28T13:46:00.000-08:00

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.

1996-01-27T13:44:00.000-08:00

January 27

Down at the piano and played. Dance was some consolation. A small moral carnival, a system of aesthetics far superior to mine. Trust in plumed processions. Community, an indispensible function. Punctual and sedate. The crowded air and neighboring life. Summer in a steadfast land. The faded syllables that quicken us. To a village for breakfast when winter shook the lines. Memorials in the snow. The thoughtful grave encloses untravelled roads. The bosoms where frost has lain. The immediate kindness of nature in its most extreme. The spirit of grace in landscape, blood and form. To reach so small a goal, dare to touch it now, to get away. In short, to prosper.

This the signal, woe. Another such vehicle through what transported anguish. Watched for faith in vain where schoolboys dare not look. The effort of maintaining an attitude in the new-fashioned world. To plunge through the ice into frozen water without abolishing or altering syntax, without perishing in the process.

Like a whip, we were given winter, silent, its sharp white teeth from the ocean of possible words. The visible presence of perfection’s faultless armature, the internal order shunning disguise, the crystalline structure of a delirium so sweet as to be obeyed. An opening to the world which turns and looks, which presents itself implicit in the continuous, violent, always capable impasse into which the ever-more-fatal concantations can occur only in convulsions, chimeras, hallucinations. A strange overwhelming suffocation slowly into a constellation our science knows. We have purified our perception of form, a sodden almost diluvian problem in terms of symptoms. Region, the ultimate form, is not elaborated, is deprived of any existence and reduced to empty analyses. Swallowed up in their blind surrender. Cowardice becomes a glowing hope, that one distinctive consolation under the useless and stupefying night hammered by gongs. Damp matches, a can of sardines. Grief the largest part of joy but not enough. That superhuman road of passions, which is mania, the frenzied nadir smelling faintly of carbolic acid. It is the whole body which suffers, provokes the signs. Arms, legs, the face left derelict and bleeding. Space exploded in signs, assumes the part of a relay station, a supply depot in arctic wartime, escapes the old localization. The marvelous gift of the forest inflamed, and of silence. Snow filling these low places slowly but forever. In this secret night the fatal core is absent, we plunge through darkness accompanied by dogs.

Fools are all I see revealed by history, this skeletal body rising slowly like radar under colored lights, this hound within the heart. Phosphorescent flesh reveals the dark rage of the masters of nature, masters of the world, of our ships, our immense literature, our vocation of a common odyssey into the threats and secrets of the world, the punishment of our disorderly and useless science confined within the city gates, not linked to the world like other precious substances, no value as passage or premise, blurred and disturbed in its wild untamable complacencies. The imperial heart beguiled by centuries. Useless as the next morning’s sun.

A small group of people stand around on the streetcorner listening in the silence. Newspapers, morality, tomorrow’s Europe. On the morning of this licentious liberty they are not sure where to turn. More victims asking for the same fate which encloses everyone. Still weary they follow the road. Doomed, unheard.

Pity the industrious angels, gone where the jugglers have gone.

My eye outweighs my heart. How odd the girl’s life looks, behind this soft eclipse.

The things to watch for, next time. And shut the windows down.

1996-01-26T13:41:00.000-08:00

January 26

The usual delirium of the world, forever, at random and by moonlight.

Views of life established on a certain street on the outskirts. Entering the sunlit room in the morning. There is another sunshine, something quieter than sleep, easy in the solitude to articulate as imminent. Silent, without violence. A succinct expression of the unbridgeable distance around a segment of language. Sea air, sunshine and patience, unconscious human agency sweeping in a wide circle on the wide earth. All velvet and truth this morning. (The extraordinary altruism of the elite subject.)

Some unspeakable dweller on the threshold. Willing to believe in anything.

The light haunted. A violin in this dark shed.

Bells also in the village, on this morning which is a festival morning. A hundred drums and shouts. The distant strains of triumph. The weight of definition can turn to cold yet the spirits do not wander far, walking naked in the snow, provoked by signs. Near each other, for suffering, upon the paths they trace in acid vapours. Incapable of rest, inconceivable, their trajectory written on their faces by time and its massacres, its riddle and its truth, secretly animated, penetrating the world, situated in bodies, the gibbet, the physical locus of a difficult but essential liberty. The animal in man no longer with any recourse, no word, no stubborn device. No escape from the vapour.

The lodging we wanted, as we could refuse to rise from our beds. Rid of the burden.

Apathy just at the moment. That my voice were gone for good.

(or better paid and more artistic)

1996-01-25T13:25:00.000-08:00

January 25

A free and generous sympathy carried, stretched from a great distance, such a benevolent neutrality of early images rising again to the completely isolated surface, surrounded by a purer air, restored to its truth as cage. This harmful hour within which beauty chooses to rise, within the rigor of an alchemy peculiar to its denial that it is subject. The loss of our insignia. Hawthorn and wild roses. Winter light barely fallen from the silence, night of nothing but faintly luminous discomfort. These shadowy places and the creatures they harbor: the geography of men and the promiscuity of evil. Close the window, draw the curtains. That gravitation, stumbling and falling amid the stars and constellations. The whole imaginary landscape reappears, a dormant world in search of oxygen, of monsters supposedly engulfed. Ravaged faces behind masks of voluptuousness, they return absolutely intact from this, to become its persecutor and contagious pleasures, having refused cruelty and the longing to suffer a dialectic lacking all possible horrors. The heart’s mediation and memory’s sudden conversion are obliterated in the sharp and sudden emergency of a century, one of those almost-magical abrupt shortcuts, as increasingly obscure moral powers become more and more obscure, more and more miraculous, deeper into a strange world, a transparent and clear moral practice and moral tactic, not the first to attempt abolished silence and observation, not even to condescend to language. A pure object without any resistance, an almost motionless movement to decipher what is essential. An unconditional return and absolute submersion.

We do it, coats or boots bathed in light, picture to ourselves the religious world, upon direct relations of subjection and its blessed and magnified magnitude. Emanated, perhaps more suggestive, nothing but fragmentary first form embracing the whole world. Without as yet fixing it, we replace the linen with gold, isolated from the point of view between physical things as what they really are, the shape of their value without restriction. This transubstantiation quite accidental for having created need. Dissolves into the mere transient, as two poles of a magnet by one empty of meaning. Phenomenal form merely an ideal act inconsistent with poetic chronology. Before and after is a tautology. Uncultivated land is a form of motion instead of being.

Bargemen walk singing on the shore. Sails at rest, anchors, the breathless sun roams the day.

Existing for one another merely a little closer, by tacit understanding. Brains coalescing with each other, each in the presence of its own independent form peculiar to itself, a misery so eloquently denounced as to be universally misled through the mouth by mutual consent. A matter of accident, abstract, undifferentiated and therefore equal. The recognized incarnation, no matter how great the fall. And the equally rapid substitution of fresh ones in their places, excessive perturbations periodically arising, taking the shape, the same fate, the same smoke, passing from one form to the other, constantly being thrown out, constantly fluctuating, only to disappear again immediately. Co-terminous with the territories petrified into a hoard are the bones: military marches, tens of thousands of saints, a sacrifice of the lusts of the flesh at the opposite pole, making a long journey to some want, this antagonistic movement over the blossoming countryside rolls by, realized in coats, corn, iron, gold, all downhill, soon there will be carts and wagons and trains, blows continue to rain down upon the earth, the way back nailed up, that dying lie rising carriage by carriage, mute from transport, tarnished by winter, traced, pierced, all the miles shortened, where the woods start, headlong, innocent, terrible, nothing here but coming and going, bits and scraps, flickering, weaving form from substance, rising or falling to the same extent, everything dark and gleaming, all the effects more valuable than the conclusion.

The red array.

These children flutter home, meeker than they were. Wander no more the village street, bound by an indifferent dawn. The boat unguided. Just such a coffin in the heart.

As if the bells of Ghent were ringing.

The flags of nations when roses cease to bloom. Theatrical representation of a dead man’s banquet, as in marriage for example, a play on words effected by the suppression of theatre. The secret and often invisible wealth of nature, games of theatrical illusion, the rigorous refusal of therapeutics. A slight movement resembling candles around the table, dinners at home, a partner in bed. Steeples and towers, a kind of parade in a graveyard, the whole night sky open. Every evening a comedy. The decomposition of the flesh, its fine particles sharp as needles, the violence of destination. The entire violent pathetic separation, the extreme fantasy of the image, the empty, nocturnal space of the old limiting. Thus one begins to dream. The vast enclosure, scientific and experimental, assembling passion and mathematics, an entire literary development. Their chatter, their anxiety, that vague delirium of eighteenth-century men in chains who passed through cities, ulcer across centuries, terrible to the future, incentive to slavery. The eighteenth century, when the text was written, a physiology of corporeal continuity penetrating even the densest internal space, imitating the luxuries from which they are suffering. Endowed with remarkable properties (liquid through a tube), emaciated in the service of the everlasting grip, the clenched fist. Its immediate vivacity entirely in the space of the imagination that speaks, made pale and dressed like the dead, began to eat almost anything that is concrete: honey, wood, chimney soot, given by what is by nature in the composition of all bodies, the carbon in the jewel. Wonder-working iron mingling with blood, dissolving with amorous melancholia, forming an inexhaustible reservoir of operative metaphors endowed with all possible complicities, technically virtuous, easy, joyous, sweet, these iconographic representations of the methods of awakening, to burn to the bone, imaginary dead bodies and flat surfaces, the paroxysm forever, by penetrating the body. In their delirium entirely understood their right to murder.

On the ground and against the wall. In the city and in the country. Bodies gathering in a graveyard. So much listening. A glow, at night, in winter. The storm, in league to fool. Every ten centuries yellow stars have silence. Grief, hills, eternity. (For an hour.)

1996-01-18T13:24:00.000-08:00

January 18

Guns, thunder, earthquakes, thrashings matter, here the senses stuck in this or that lamentation, sound of vile action, silently leave it again by dismay, the most frightening curiousity or disgust. Morning’s first hours frightened like dilated eyes, shapes moved about in spirit, marooned.

The colossi hover, burning.

Forgetfulness and hysteria, out to the woods, as in the selection of certain tones, the old, unfillable ones. Is in fact a sophisticated denial. To disclose the secrets of the motor is in fact a sophisticated denial. Thoroughly puritanical any satisfaction. The mind in its effort at separation immediately surrendered to some new master. Go around in a perpetual state of reputation, abandoned, dissonant, reaches a pair of gloves into a stove. The loving embrace becomes translator, the experience appears a complete world, pale and cruel, without eliciting pity. Childish. (To believe). Again and again the same questions. Their bitterness, their poison, how lack of freedom is nurtured. And kindness to the gallows. Consistent champions of the unpleasant, in two languages, and sincere.

The click of the garden gate. Takes you to witness. Into the spotlight she stands, the floor collapses, this time they’re helicopters, opening and shutting. The ancient navigators, so old, reconstructing this drama, passing through the orchard, water nearby, no sea-smells, everything is altered but remains. In discrete parts, like sentences displaced by a mass view. Ghosts frightened, handed down over sharp edges, praise one master after another. Receive revelations and be fertilized.

Achievement has disappeared, destroyed, loyalty in a white nightshirt and a mask, tragedy is over and the dead can snore, not used to freedom, how to live in freedom, experience spoke against. Slept with both arms embracing. The secret of that seclusion. The literature of toxicology. Paralyzed at the sight. Endured nothing, the lamp shining in broad daylight. Powerless European science finally inconclusive and the state reduced to means of indexing things efficiently. And that I should be lost for years.

What is expected is already gone. Opaque ghosts, dense details, misery, in order to continue, more or less unaware, together on a private path, pieces being pieces of something.

Background not fixed. A place of muffled cries, against the world in some form. To be a master through the centuries. In a certain light the city always finished, forever. Of cancer and a broken heart. With glassy eyes at the sky. The radio covers the murder. The rope around the neck of the world. And the houses with pale windows. We live in wooden cases, dark fabrics. The anxiety born of time. To rekindle the anger, dismember ritual, impossible duty and disobedience. Every collection dispersed, instead of rigid and microscopic work against their explicit prohibition. Give in to surrender. We live in the imperishable dust, for knowing it is dead. Cold, still blooming though the sun has risen, and here we are again all waiting for the noose to drag us up to the bird-riddled sky.

1996-01-17T13:22:00.000-08:00

January 17

In the name of strict justice, the porcelain smeared with blood, death burning and then icy, the wantonness and turmoil of the slaughter, I mean that our manners have declined, every day, in order to burn until all this suffering cease (glad not to receive too many letters), nothing but an everlasting chatter seriously at anything, your mythology compared to mounting difficulties. (Then followed the business about the mythology and the knitting.) Separate until now.

Skeletons, sterilizations and similar medical matters, scientific and classical culture with the appropriate language, communication, even affection, enclosed in armor. The masses entering paradise, if just supposing, with a slight taste of defeat, they were mistaken, already started, forward march, the arrogance of a large part, pale as wax, tired of believing the chemistry, the complete obtuse inertia of virility (by analogy) and the men at his disposal, saddling him with acts, accusing each other, pleasure bursts all circumstances to recover what has been lost, ultimate episodes, appearances of religion and austerity (and bizarre episodes of luxury.) The area our tastes cherish.

Pleased to inflict wrath and triumph, his coat stuffed with food, little tramp,it is impossible to doubt a little less hunger, a space cluttered up, swept up by the fierce rythmn of paint and tar from the greasy earth, flock to them with blessings and tears, throwing oneself on the other side of a barrier.

We know the impulse well. Nothing but the smell of the sea.

except that it has no end.

that great stream of men

all wearing black and many using spectacles. Their opinions with untiring energy. The consequences, with horror, can hardly wait. The houses trembled like a wisp of grass in the wind.

Typewriters, Persian rugs, electric clocks, cloth, etc etc, electric clocks in the street, the soldiers with their drums, bundles lurching in the night, the rythmn of the great machine, the persons lucky enough to be onlookers, the discipline of geography (which might be described as conditional - becoming boring with all my burglars.) Criminal in nature, to act using priority in the order, due to the restraining influence of such a brief span of time. But the worst trouble came anyway, nothing but endive for a long time, day in, day out, endive with sand, endive without sand. Poorly-wrapped freezing day of fog begun to decompose, polluting the precious snow. Too late to disappear, no room for gratitude, all the languages of Europe accompanied by incomprehensible prayers, deserted and lifeless, white as far as the eye, lying under flight, shamefully visible from our windows, this endless plain, frozen and full of war and spirits and patiently scraped of anything which might be of use: axes, buckets, ladles, nails.

Ca roule encore?

Ca roule toujours. Out over all the roofs and on to the horizon: this sunshine, these cloudless skies, a great loathing for algebra, geometry, figures. Predictable failure, it was already common without being given language (and) rules. An authentic, shining humanity dreaming about all. Hence can be recognized as paraphenalia, far from being a mere symptom, mere reasons of prestige. The monolithic quality of this form (the old consolation no longer worked anyhow, deficient as it was (in proper hostility) to test the objectives of this particular set of motives), no definite figures endowed with this quality who were to do the work to be done. Motive power but hardly evidence of . . . . The same subtly-veiled resistance, the same failures to fulfill them. One begins to wonder: blood for trucks (as an historical memory and obsolete distinction) and listen to music, and, of course, accept.

Suffering, the gruesome Terminal Of All, so pleasantly at least devoid of cheap oratory. (If the trains entered a theatre . . . .) Strenuous denials and the utter lack in this field, ie. was everywhere, an empty space in the vicinity of railroad tracks, the damage from a distance. Understandable, even human sometimes but not good. Searching for a good argument against that terrible word “easy.”

Depths, depths where there is no comfort.

Incapable of doing anything good. People wished, they have it, occupy themselves with superficial things, bow down before the blows, crumbs from the rich man’s table, ridiculously inadequate. Stories told over and over to substantiate the paradox, how it was possible not to discover employment without any difficulty. A previously-rented house in a remote suburb. A bed, which was the only aspect around which many thoughts crystallized, feelings of elation, origins, customs, habits, organization, folklore, economy, the planners and those executing the deeds on all sides and in all walks of life, and the tools required for the investigation. Authority, whose weight depends upon its limitation and the extreme reluctance of all concerned to break fresh ground, to relate to and have intercourse with each other beyond the borders and limitations of its validity. Who fall back upon the compromised phraseology perpetrated upon the body, with the discovery of technical devices, parties, balls, beautiful girls (eun kans om naar Holywood te komen), dinners, a large home, etc etc, again spinach in our hollow stomachs (la colere a tirer sa vengeance) and the facts which reduce it to nothing again, into a wilderness: the ever-approaching thunder: meet the horrible truth and be shattered.

1996-01-16T13:21:00.000-08:00

January 16

The house, which was otherwise so silent. The haunting lucidity of insomnia, that used-up look of the dead (one can easily make a mistake) the necessary black occasion for an immortal undertaking, a strict sense of duty held the signs of a very disciplined and methodical energy, notoriously the most liquid, lying with one ear pressed to the floor, half-paralyzed from remaining, every muscle taut under the skin (conspires to leisurely voluptuousness, incredibly frivolous . . .), lungs made of bronze, for them when they do hear it, barely marked with a faint thread of blood. A chapel in a small forest. (. . . nothing can happen to us).

1996-01-15T13:19:00.000-08:00

January 15

Begin by exoneration and end by confession. Into words, yet. Oh so many things too can reach the bursting point. In this country one can look at it fixedly, some grave fault, a pattern only, intermittently, some faded musical comedy (remember some of those innocent songs) with its chorus line, with gifts and tears. Implored, the greatest grief and sorrow migrate inland and there take up the unfamiliar science. Work and bread. Strangers in the house.

Thoroughly upset by the sudden change, these horrors have faded a bit in our mind(s) by inhabiting the other. Turned from the present to the future, the damning sentence ad nauseum. Apathy their abominable passions not permissable to reproach. Labor to determine the boundaries, obscure for us, blissfully unaware. Any alliance on any other basis the instigation of plot, touching here and there their precious evidence (things other than hunger or work).

Hammering a nail whose compassion to arouse the basic idea of some humiliating chicaneries, some much-repeated tickings-off and warnings.

Wooden staircase through the passage in pitch darkness.

Its conduct in the struggle often lasting centuries. Not a sudden blaze with the brutality of a violent egoist.

These preparations entail explanations. The by-now-shining bottom of the bowl, the double nature of the engine. Only the barest glimpse of hugely-expanded activities, taken in a dense clump (who bored them were idealists). Personal feelings, emotions distinct and concrete, regardless of their citizenship. (Abandons her post without permission)

Our superpractical exquisite, as we had always imagined, and which in victory was always replenished. A safe egress demands undivided attention. Be merciless, be impartial, be obeyed. (viciousness renders it more agreeable).

See what kind of person is riding the machine. Nothing but raincoats and the back of a hat. Sometimes marching in a circle, to prevent the consummation of the act, escape his murderous mechanism out of gear, duties so clumsy must be abandoned. Fires and orphans and loathsome revels, everything that the law of place allows (personally too much of a coward). Excellent and always copious insidious delusions, the same story with almost imperceptible variants, this time yellow ones, a different elating cliche for every period. Faulty memory, an even colder classroom. For nearly everyone it ends in open struggle, the usual little struggle under a load almost lovingly accompanying the blows, sufficient to undo “assimilation,” patiently and monotonously from the pulpit, just like that, fear of everything connected. Knees knocking, blood-soaked, and after a certain amount of squabbling able to declare, and prove, exactly how exactly what the frightful puppet show, obscene or ghostly under the great arch, thick-heeled shoes dance a deadly dance and the cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies slumbering in the heart of the very last never-spatially-limited heterogenous desires went down as at sea, fiercely, unequivocally, uncompromisingly unaware of the sinister moods and different “elating” phrases. Cruelty is the signal, servitude the terrible obligation. Content to the weak body as reason without annoying silently and calmly forgets the smoke carried by the wind.

Wait, the whole forest waits. Green with forests and our hearts tighten.

and we will have one enemy less.

Afterwards, in a period of opulence, gambling dens, streetwalkers, pickpockets and burglars, more radical with each passing month, obscene or ghostly under the great arches. More blasting and further frays, the only things alive are machines and slaves, the confusion of languages erected in defiance, as if uncertain, following imperceptible tracks like a bloodhound, unhappy in the manner of free men. Lunacy of believing the faults of others in the face of all this shouting, an incorrigible tendency permanently occupied by a tumultuous throng, repositories of a concrete, mundane conscious wisdom, collapsed at once, some abominable ragged bosom torn from the mouths of the living or the dead. Incessant crime their hearts’ desire, virtually at random, crushed at the moment of release against the bottom, the saved and the drowned, the slope down to the bottom an opaque intimate solitude. Injury received from above, specifically mentioned as the model, a shadow-fund of heroic virtues based on work and culture, the mumbled intelligibilities, classic signs of loss ameliorating the delirium around the corpse with a certain puzzlement.

Whole country, another image, a by-no-means-small sum of aberrations and compromises, survival without renunciation and afterwards sneak back to their filth, and the earth itself, whose nearness quickens, ignored only by the voice.

One might easily guess the apotheosis.

1996-01-14T13:17:00.000-08:00

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.

1996-01-13T13:16:00.000-08:00

January 13

They count and recount for over an hour so that they might languish, continent in dissolution, behind pointless clues, hidden fingers. No one knows, no one sees. Numbers of men and the safety of the increasing. The corpse of the state, a vestal, this monster practically beyond stupidity, producing the ecstasy, bearing witness to the absence. This monster was outfitted, broken to the saddle, intervenes to restrict pleasure to the violation. Such eloquence to supplicate the best as worthy of living, vital urge in its ultimate form watches its free play of brutalities succeeded by new challenges. The traitor lays cuts, blindness to renounce the crisis, escapes (her and her labor), labor in a life of sweet slumbers.

Exchanging one torment for another. A special kind of boredom for a walk through this world. Tranquility, it seems, in a dark room, many hours a day. A bone and crawl. The loneliness surrounding ideas. Merely meant preparing the ground instead of actually building houses. The wheel deserted, then abandoned.

Desire over the deep sea, leading to death.

The wheel surrendered, and apart. Silent, motionless, with the light shining down among the dead stumblings on the distant earth.

This pale light, promise, a charlatan or seducer of children. That sweet shore launched the object, no doubt, and words to carry away. Stiff creatures in robes and uniforms, and cynical spirit, to all popular applause. The drilled-in habit of obedience, empty-handed, repeating facts without comment. Another three or four factories in the middle of the night, by train.

How white, how little desirous.

Yet we must exhaust the same feeling, of the burning ship surrounded. Singing snatches of songs.

These fathers and mothers burned down to their sockets.

It is the same music which only great, lonesome hearts could understand. As memory even into the silent grave forever, no memory even for the complete disruption of the world, this beautiful world, the living, the straightforward, the future. A small table and a whiskey. That same old-world village in every direction. Shelter and protection till morning.

The fires men light at night.

1996-01-12T13:15:00.000-08:00

January 12

Large doses of codeine. (This was done on purpose)

1996-01-11T13:14:00.000-08:00

January 11, 1996

A hiding place. A fire. A pair of shoes (marvelous shout!)
Passing the bicycle sheds. Don’t dash down all at once, climb in and out of the empty wagons all in a heap, quite untrue, stiffly side by side indefinitely. Ill-fitting teeth, vivisection in order to inspect and pain yet to experience, beginning to talk of that already. A comb, old letters rather than anger committed on the body in no mood to learn. A little ashamed of our silence, tired of being amazed. Other shoes, other clothes lying on the table, stripped beds. They came in and closed the door behind them. Rare interventions surrounded by an abyss.

“to avoid separation from captured relation”

joined to all this sorry business about her body.

With tender care their accordians and violins, to this cruel and silly imposition of certain constraints, the work done there in daylight, the necessity of living under it with particular joy, within which thieves are marked. Bundles tied together mysteriously, without the influence of men. Simply amazed in my present state of disgrace, shuddering and always a little duty to obey.

(The gallows if you lose)

A hundred miserable and sordid puppets to lie on the bottom, rubbish, indescribably so. The funereal science of numbers in this house burnt to a cinder and refused by their own competence is the absolute center of the present. Full of fervor the gardener rings and I penetrate blindly as almost always, half-complacently and lingering, sensing vague inquietude arise, bitter scorn and mockery, not a hair’s-breadth difference makes us ferocious and we cannot sit down to hide from the wind (do not pull the wool over your eyes) vous n’etes pas a la maison.

1996-01-10T13:13:00.000-08:00

January 10

Sincere male and bloodless female, pressed together without pity. With long unnerving halts.

Outbursts don’t calm them.

Espionage, seduction and collapse. (this can never . . .)

Sheer comedy, frequently incomprehensible. In German!

An obscure agitation in the middle of a dark silent (anything theatrical) swarming with shadows swallowed them up.

1996-01-09T13:12:00.000-08:00

January 9

Temples. Mildewed brown walls. Candles and open mouths, a bunch of roses more patient that just out of the blue.

So, albeit unwillingly, one gets warm, shuddering and always a little incredulous.

1996-01-07T13:11:00.000-08:00

January 7

Such violence is punished and its author (!) subjected to the general laws of work imprisoned in a moral world. That grovel in full suppliance which radiates vast monotony, vigor, their dark freedom which yields all resemblance to torment, assails with the same order in the uniform chastisement they continually encounter and leads them to the last degree of corruption in a world where their rages pronounce upon true circumstances with scrupulous pity for misfortune set at liberty. Premature confidence in something of a suffocating passion. Nothing more to hope for, like anybody else. A momentary illusion, full of pretty things, which always turns to hatred. The confirmation of a cynical process, free and dangerous, in the dark and underground, against marauding beasts and the wandering vicious. Their animal status not solved thereby. Every day the uproar, the horror upon seeing crime and indigence united in the sight of strangled prisoners, of swinging chains, of citizens who cherish the confusion of those years. All familiar subjects being hidden momentarily, the soul, so difficult, crushed, prostrate, conscious of nothing, restructures the images, useless images serving the great loss, the sight of evil in the depth of nature, in ancestral habit. It bears what subsists. Its own right carries over, scattered to their follies.

A liberty that rages, no longer the mode of relation that obtains. Found as much in work as not to be rejected, yet with absolute rigor marking the boundary (very precise from the outside) where it would be afraid.

Arrested by the new situation, the greatest liberty and the greatest comfort, delirious illusions, an entire ceremonial nothing circulated by all they may betray and reveal, a passage from a world of censure, to deny its dissimulation reduced to silence. Its silent magic the powers of language without response. The gesture submits quietly to be led, subjugated then encouraged, becoming a form of coexistence, both domination and destination. An absolute value, a temporal halo, performing through the entire bodily machine a light which turns day into night and night into day. Imaginary, deposited by it and only solidified as not yet possible to predict. (Obligatorily interpreted as profanations.)

The secret thousand horrors beneath their helmets.

This harmful hour within which beauty chooses to rise.

1996-01-01T13:11:00.000-08:00

January 1 1996

Shops displaying nothing. Girls fallen into idiocy.

Countless high streets with villages around them. Weather like Easter. Cognac bottles hidden under bosoms, transistors bristling with bayonets. Stupidity, ignorance and lack.

(that the cataclysm is above) memorials and restaurants.

The potato sky, a man falling.

Immemorial figures in a giddy, mad delirium.

1995-12-31T13:10:00.000-08:00

December 31

A gesture of resignation against uneventfulness, a fierce eddy, seized and searched, without a visible breath. A small rain of charity descends, not genuinely knowing nor desirous. No fatherlands, no uniforms. All barriers and limitations recede. Further into the morass and continue to go slowly, glancing along a dark avenue. Such strenuous efforts, useless tasks, conducted so grimly, never as a creature with a history. More than venerable, dead.

Into the black street, nothing. Every thoughtless word followed, the intelligence of rats that sailed no better.

Blood and other blood, to and fro, crammed with widows. Casualties of the sea upon the moonless nights, and trains over bridges. A patch of starry sky to adorn moments of rapture and elation.

So much freedom of movement forever and ever in that inner harbor.

1995-12-29T13:08:00.000-08:00

December 29

Emigres of all kinds overshadow us, their furtiveness, their eternal repetition in an age of illusions all the more alluring for being vague. Absorbed in a sweet, boundless sort of hallucination, supported by sustained chords, dangerous remarks, the simplest stories. Porcelains, iron and bicycles. (The relation of movement to rest.) Disguised words from foreign languages, a hidden structure necessary to deny the evidence and prolong the danger.

Writing in the hope of (corrupting) the time to come distinguishes it, the melancholy and misanthrophic train of ideas, vagabond symbolic passage of man’s image, transmits, shifts and multiplies, uncertain and inexhaustible, acquires assignable form in the confused result of accidents, the diseases and other accidents of human life repeated night after night, a decor that situates subjects in the climate itself, utterly superfluous. An entire war machine through which love passes, belonging to it under given relations that leave it mumbling at the altar. In the midst of things, throughout. Between particles. No form, no center of gravity. What is a girl? What is a group of girls? Each of us (everyone) in ourselves, immobilized and incapable of eliminating all that is resemblence. As a woman flees, disguised, helplessly into the depths. Choking, frozen, down a narrow road in among the trees, the mysterious world, the poison garden. Another specific instance of a greater or lesser number of similar operations whispered, whispered and indefatigably repeated, the same endless and tirelessly-repeated complaints, the harassment of an imagination sharpened by pain, its essence mingled with the criminal, led there to the last degree of curruption, the power to act. The slow death.

The slow death whose countless threads raise questions in the social sphere, in a world where the rigorously-executed mechanical work of dissension and shameful distress prevails and theories of economy and necessity are arbitrary in the last instance. There are rules, rules it constructs, the principle, the engine to it a personality whose powers borrowed from science only their disguise. Voltairean stories in different shapes emitting mournful sounds and piercing cries. Instincts adrift and out of history, a frightening picture of the future, the management of days by devotion towards error, towards the severe principle exclusive of its fantastic text, within the grandiloquence of ideas and continual sarcasms. Humiliated in an abandon by silence to transgression, after long hesitations eroded into monologue.

The unfailing plenitude of presumption. This then is the phase of abatement, simplification and discrimination, with the signature and sanction of the true and untrue around us, of shadows and prowlers, of gold crosses glittering in sunlight. A vague story ending in a suicide certain to be a failure.

Entering into the life of men to learn what goes on. Plunging from glowing emotions, from so low a level, movements which lie in the depths, over a sunken mouth. The power to represent actions, entirely under the pressure of wordless isolation appealing to the dark. Drunken scream and fused detachment, all finely produced to satisfy, to concede and release. Simplicity of heart like coming out of a palace into a ruined cottage.

The voices coming anyway. Shadows in daylight to be engulfed. Stuck and flickering. Vaguely in the dim light bodies falling, going in and out in the darkness. Vanished, come into view again. A mouthful of water and then setting down. Breathing without a sound. Into silence, each mumbling down the narrow passage to wish ourselves dead. Stupefying fumes of the heavy sea. No stars, no sun, no universe. Only the sparrows as sparrows.

In the center, ceaseless grief.

And all the buildings started moving, while doing nothing. Adrift somehow. Satisfied with the illusion. As people do. Easier to attain than to get rid of. To regard death, at some unspecified point far from the actual frontier, as rare transmutation to the rising of revellers, bitter and blind, wine gone, a dull wrack where all is dark. Below, experience is keeping silent under the constant effort of having to do something, the fundamental division of labor, the normal condition as beast of burden, crucified and murdered and let starve. The loot of every other great and lonely rising of millions.

The rising of millions with the parade of cannons. The little, impotent, mystical and sadistic, finally become capable. Crowds strolling the broad avenues in the mild April weather. An interminable procession of days. Weightless, lonely, going to seed in a distracted condition become beautiful. Afternoon light, glistening in amazement at the weeping face. Confessing two rooms and a kitchen deep. Minor disturbances begin to exhaust the good old days. Down with infinite precautions, fear of material consequences.

Truth as tactics.

Room for living as solution.

An empty room contains listeners.

The mistake one makes is to speak.

1995-12-28T13:08:00.000-08:00

December 28, 1995

The physique has deteriorated, bears the emblem of the ruler, who demands great exertions. Paupers, vagrants, criminals, prostitutes. The two-fold nature (anvil and iron) may be traced to various phenomena (his motor roars into action) which rise and fall, and by rising and falling (leave purely symbolic representation out of consideration here) keeps to the rythmn, the law of averages. Young ones, the weak, with sudden enthusiasm, with a contagious desire in bars and cafes, go one day to buy something in the electrical warehouse, yarn for example, or boots or stones, resting quietly side by side. Schools, herds, populations, animals are bound up with the sum and value of differences, something in the brain that shouldn’t be there. And under cover of darkness the coal burnt under the boiler vanishes without a trace into the corpses of machines, tools and warehouses. A great revolution, the whole world produces nothing. Harsh wine, hard bread and jagged knives. The demon as the power of contagion and alliance, the chain of indescribable pleasure in possession, superfluous, redundant, caught together, furniture for support, full of obscene pictures, conscience like a crime.

The single person, which is the transformed shape, begets the others, all those lines or dimensions, the bakers, the locksmiths, the watchmakers, the sailors, the miners, the vagrants, the assailants. The women. Subjects, accidental forms, in total darkness, supressed, or nearly supressed, dishevelled and haggard, blackened faces in a kind of alliance of love, of things imperceptible. In the wrong but not entirely. Men in the catacombs, expressing their regret, take up position on the wolves’ borderline, bury their bayonets in the earth. Once more the things they are afraid of losing. The vapours of the cellar flicker. The properly musical becomes a swarm of bees. All of a sudden the strains of the Marseillaise.

1995-12-27T13:07:00.000-08:00

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.

1995-12-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

Monday, December 25, 1995

The avenue is built on sunlight, as if the whole stinking world brings itself into existence to wander around and around like birds on the unified surface, everywhere, for the wonder of discovery. And in the present one moves with it, into every genre, tiny cracks and postures operating, the nuances and nothing. All the more industry and concentration, abruptly punctuated, the rush, thrown away, shouts shouted. Men’s profiles and attentive eyes. Strokes of madness appear between voices and the body, shards, as lightly as an impression of horror conveyed. Silky, charming, beautiful, everything aware, the sky open up to let all encompass us completely in a hideous costume. The dress, massive, lies heavily and complex, all of it human, always always you.

Want to run, run, run around, run, instantly being welcomed. A liberating, absurd singleness. A view of the sea and the horizon. No walls, no ceiling, the sun transformed overnight into a criminal, which, startled, follows hearts rather than one straight north, and I weaken as before, to and fro with disturbances. The slowest of movements, or the last. My sentimental moment to bore into the warm center, hello, hello, good day, good day. Intoxication come down like nails into wood. A constant inclination to lay oneself down, such complete repose to restore, abandon the position, bring the experiment to an end. The sea the earth and all men. The sounds of the last fragments, this, that, in certain situations, just abandoned, in short.

Lift it up, take it off. The wheel and the brakes. The everlasting examinations, the instrument panel and the wretchedness. The particular mood that makes chemical factories, gasworks, as if there were no such thing as a bigger prison. Tall thin windows forming a large row. Air into calm white. Still on, the cones swinging, towards the edge, rattling doorhandles along the sidewalk. Beautiful girls disappear into the shadows. Amnesiacs, ataxics, catatonics who are on their way in gasps and bursts, into the same distortion of terror. Little girls and then a chalk face, the despotic face of the fallen.

Caught, to lull youself in a gambling and indolent network of interpretations. Too concerned with measuring its rectangle or circle to mind its exceptional need to be protected from this directness, this happiness, these half-formed incoherences, the other volumes and cavities. Threatened by something reaching forever in the intervals between journeys. Charred shell, floating still, alone, returning. No word, no stubborn device. Some ashes which yet adhere. How hollow the reconciliation upon the features of the dead, like a flower, silent. The other volumes and cavities. Lay back down into this highly-polished beginning and laboriously grow cold, grow small. You cannot go further in life than this sentence.

1995-12-24T13:05:00.000-08:00

Sunday, December 24, 1995

To insist on a division of labor, the difference and the borderline, all under a layer of coal. Dust into the chute a few times, then the building grows, in loud strokes, not quickly. Rooms undisturbed until noon superceded by practical considerations. Genuine science so deeply buried. At the edge of an abyss. No answer to misery.

This pain of ours, the day, penetrating ever more deeply. Decorating the tomb. Women light a match in order to be ruined. As a swimmer panics. In the same blind alley. Under the soundless, nearly soundless, compulsion made living. Traffic, rising and falling, the timid souls who make the cannon sound. A product, and in a way innocent. Your pale, anonymous, inarticulate, democratic prize, a target for guns sooner or later, that disappointed expression of the distribution of power in Europe. Guns and the sound they make with the other whores on the outward slope. On the small white table. Ignorance, what ignorance and reduction, familiar and unfamiliar as with voices from the window arousing sympathy. To understand, and to try, perceived as mere sound. The spires and chimneys moving westward into the countryside for the next hundred years.

Rational, logical, but everything a natural basis for arguing against the asphalt and the stone bridge. The noise, the pressure of the rotors. Combinations, constituents, beautifully everything gone at the edge of the train tracks in their brown tombs. Living with it even in Berlin, long hours of weeping again with a sad gravity, driven back in the same black car, enclosed in the hollow of these bodies on this smooth wall, overtaken. Happiness as something perpetually at a loss, at the table, shattered, trying to recall, in fact merely wearied them. All the shoemakers of the world vanished, with autumn’s leaves, into the planetarium, the infinitely vast field of the living.

The music stops and the circus lies in total darkness. In a vacuum but among each other, the naked, closed facades in an empty room with a crucifix. Strange farewells, so soon cold and hard, and their deserted air, the way shadows will, slowly, kisses in air. Revolutionary patience or revolutionary impatience. The prisoner or prison conditions forced into a monologue. The other, with great presence. The only languages used in order to survive. Every bedroom and intimate scene and making dumb sounds in the back of the room. The forms of all objects similar, incapable of much emotion, doomed to resemble one another. Bad luck and abandoned. A day’s work like a proper comrade. The passengers survive. Individuals imbued with the principles of the state (up a little stairway to the floor above). Anything, or what they do.

The interruption in silence then the silence again, till the horses for hours in the field.

Only matter matters. Paradise, pain.

Explanation has been less than complete.

1995-12-23T13:03:00.000-08:00

Saturday, December 23, 1995

Some white garden.

Disappearance. Another room. Turned the key and now come to speech, yet unaccustomed to the sight, forlorn without it, and in each occasion seen in a gesture that can act directly, and, thus, no more of a burden. Millions below the surface in general conversations among themselves, the prime minister, the minister of culture, the minister of education, of war. There are too many others like me, nothing to offer, dead sparks with no center, hands eaten by rust, and they shout, there is just so much going on, a fainted woman under a tent, the rain upon the earth, an army crosses over, a moon as red as that, breast, hand, leg, crotch, leg. Cornea, trumpetcall. Stray dogs over the the metal grating, excited, then falling on the city, vanishing left and right. The tower is falling, falling, means nothing anymore. Something horrible, consciousness. Will have none. Trained to act. To come to permission. This life on streetcorners and go back, drunk and hanging, bright red, the eyes go blind, as they are constantly being approached. Armed for descent into lies, all of it, huge stone animals on the wrong side of the river, among earth’s trading posts. Their good conscience and valor, their elevated, sacred comedy. Men’s essential distraction used up, consumed, deafening, discreet, strange, masculine, assonant, clever and uneasy. Turns and nods. Leaning back with closed eyes, more beautiful, the vanished gin and coffee, those steps in the early morning, woen with newspapers and books, vanished in their inner orbits.

Their iron slab and coal trucks. Letting loose every kind of emotion. Their factories, and our obsessions. Unable to turn completely black, existing in such contradiction, not a question of giving. There is a basic agreement beyond rationality and want that draws the blood. Astonished to see how easy it is. Attention to immaterial phenomenon.

How little seen was needed. The sunlight swinging high up. Definitely hazardous, fantastic. The thin flickering on a cracked tin violin. All the damned, many, beautiful, indifferent, fluttering, unpremeditated, the vast verdant picture I recognized. To them the final collapse by the roadside in the snow.

1995-12-22T12:37:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 22, 1995

It is evening. We are on a bus. There are a man and a woman stumbling down over rocks that jut through snow. As after bombing I saw locomotives on roofs.

The evening air might smell sweet from early snow. The stubborn soldiers tug open rusted iron doors and the ash billows out, covering us all and the snow grey. You might slip a sour candy into my lips and onto my tongue, as beautiful as a statue in your gleaming boots and black uniform. There is an orchestra of inmates to serenade us as we march off towards the forest and meadows. If you were here, you would know: the meadow looks back. The bus driver, who is here, knows: there is the undissembled, a music that follows us as we march out, undertake this, this everything already happening, already lying in the pit, the power of past days pushed over the grave again like loose soil, a dream of a love-affair by force. Discharging it into the atmosphere and unburdening the temptation to invent nothing, nothing, nothing. Likewise heartbeat, likewise tongue, likewise undissembled meadow. The paralyzed powers anchor us in this which unfurls, the bus driver and the old woman, me.

And when we march back, the music welcomes us, so it seems already like life after death.

1995-12-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

Thursday, December 21, 1995

Again we look out of two eyes, survive by sucking sugar cubes, smell through two nostrils as if the dust and ash still rose from the chimneys, hear right and left. A mere change in the form behind all attempts. Willingly open the cupboard to pick the ripe words.

The first things noticed are a number of furry brown dogs in the snow. What nice little dogs. Then they start to move.

To isolate it under artificial conditions and in doing so divert it into diagrams, harbors, knots. To form relays, meld, to escape and scatter anew, at the same time to open out onto becomes real, everything operates. To rest, to gather our food without a word. The misidenti-fication of two distinct movements becomes surface for social contact. Our coarse leather skins in proximity. Choked in it. Everything gone off. There is an I love you upon which all the rest depends. The way back takes our breath away.

1995-12-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, December 19, 1995

This desire awoke another generous action, to give almond paste and benzine down to the brothel for its amusement, to make into inventions or rhetorical figures which will serve instead as a fluid, a musical machine that prolongs the disguised mode, into private relations with itself as it were by magic.

The depths of that country within which the journey ceased, guards mistaken about things. A slight defect of vision. That's the course of nature. Peculiarities. Imagination as never before. Exercises its function, constantly passing and converting into each other. Shifting effects, a taste for overload. The pleasures of a century for looking. Passing through a million grey-blue eyes, our convoy in exchange for nothing.

The rectangular shadows of actions and passions, a long slow labor to control uncontrollable movements. The longing for sensual pleasure as an intermittent sound, a strange impotence and uncertainty bound together in a kind of golden twilight. Such diversity of forms even in a melancholy mirror. One circle of hell to the next. A long line of abolition that turns back within the darkest region of the political field.

A state of power and domination. A dead person, for want of anything better. Black gloves and close-cropped hair. No end of them. Grey-blue mirrors under cloud cover. The audience in ecstatic attitudes was called, came, was sent back. There would be tears running. Thrown back, as a clockwork doll, thinking they had mis-heard, and without being able to do
anything. Completely obedient. The ceiling and the upper surfaces. Into the darkness great pride was bound, and actually dragged away. And never ceases to return.

A lingering splendour on the ground, like veins.

A history of confrontation and intermingling. Disruption of a pre-existing discipline. At a given moment a people, mobile, fragile or destroyed, must be shoved into the background.

History as the memory of fantastic rides through the fissures of an animal howl. Right to the edges of it. The cunning seduction of avoidance. Train connections, the bed and irregular meals, utterly superfluous. The most irresistable sole object of obtaining nothing but brambles and briars, while the wicked tread upon flowers.

Waking up, so useful a lesson of submission, to the cruel events, to the unhappiness unmasked in a period as corrupt as ours. Driven across the roadway, towards the water. So that we resembled a beast.

Everywhere more furiously-harassed proofs of a delerium for which we are destined, a catastrophe so terrible, the desire to conserve one's property, the victim of our own principles, unfortunate creature will catch fire in a better world.

1995-12-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

Monday, 18 December, 1995

The key in motion, heedless. The continued corruption of the great cities, as if the rich were leaving. The gold sheep hanging in the nineteenth century. The celebrities of the day resonate together, wait for some signal, then hurry on their separate ways. Objects become companions. Sleep, drugs and amorous rapture. On the boulevards vague masses reassured like garlands of fire by the caresses they hasten to bestow: the vain terrors of religion and law, to which we so foolishly attach in order to fly to new crimes. The palace, carrying sparks. The turning point is reckoned: stupefaction has passed the middle classes' natural frontiers with wild gestures, the supremacy of present circumstances smashed out of the bottoms of broken bottles. Dull-witted, it begins giving way here and there with great courtesy (a miserable survival from that epoch), swarming around at random, away immediately and rushing, distracted by lying whispers, and disappears.

A reversion to the subject in that departure.

Stammer language, be a foreigner in any old mirror. Enunciation and the subject. Invented, namely: being slave, being foreign. The mere mention (because it is an idea) a detestation recommended to the patriots, prevents them from arriving at greatness abandoned. Which is a misfortune infinitely useful to the general scheme, the erection of a wretched chimera.

Arms in a triumphant gesture.

The slightest desire a harsh light, falling. For one cold-blooded instant an unfamiliar road (deception permitted) to lead us out of the forest of religious horror.

The instant of awakening is hideous, immolated, the very vortex of delight native to the species upon the least provocation, a kind of torture. Every kindness inflamed in order to plunge, caressed, envied, menaced, beaten from a false premise. Obscure mutterings, an unpardonable lapse of intelligence in this appalling heap of fables. The unhappy passion purely hallucinatory conformation of a bipedal individual. Simply a perpetual consequence of crimes with her blood-stained fingers. To perish inside the infallible, atrocious soul of the monster.

My unthinking heart dares yet, with despair inseparable from the metallic or musical echo, writing, writing now, or words to that effect.

Suspicions take shape, their cruel manner sating the hungers of an infinitely populous human language, corroding features now to shrieks and frenzies, a contemporary lyricism that a clumsy society has stifled without deviation. Wounded or changed by our attention, desire belongs here with us, all its verbiage whose only link, rejection, is immediately resumed.

battered, greasy, filthy, recognized

modern machinery is suddenly disturbed, afraid of the next day's work or diminish

becomes secret to avoid these dangers

yet has nothing

then again the meal expected: shops balconies and the sky

an interruption comes on stage and in doing this the real difference of form will reveal itself, brought about by the intervention as purposeless as it is absurd, becomes interminable, vanishes immediately, has therefore no limits. develops an insatiable hunger for boots, eggs, calico, and then again the meal expected: shops balconies and the sky.

1995-12-16T12:32:00.000-08:00

Saturday, 16 December, 1995

Fall outside language, or answer in principle to an ideal state, through the voice of a dog.

So many very different kinds of bodies, so many internal reasons for language and such a strong power of forgetting. The various languages between the actions and passions of bodies, and the continual passage which carries them away. The penetrations and expansions that affect bodies. The rocking of a boat, finally, this innuendo waiting like a man disembarking from a ship. Nothing has really been accomplished.

Five minutes of perfect peace and then the same sequence of events, to try and find peace somewhere, to have become obsolete.

The aeroplanes are still crossing the coast every evening. Safety in the smoldering ruins, just about choked with alarms, very tired. One or two basic books, from anybody, to reconnoiter. So human, so necessary, clearly a temporal defeat. The hollow seas closed up, already proficient in the theory with no result. Neither amazed nor damage to be repaired. Blankets unfolded, nothing remains where it is. Smoking ruins and tremble like beasts, because now someone is always, again, speaking with great consistency in choosing his words, subject to rigid language rules, trenches for the liquid according to the absorptive capacity, with beautiful frankness, an imploring voice at the door giving warning, instantly ecstatic. The blond woman in the hallway.

From quarter past seven till half past, from half past twelve till one o'clock, from two till quarter past, from four till quarter past, from six till quarter past, and from half past eleven until twelve, lived through some great agitation. The first friendly picture after the horrors, it was a perfect imitation, picked from the ground on the margins of the permissible, the chief sources of information accused in this danger to one's life. Some hope they will think up a substitute (miserable wretches and rode on) this sort of thing happens nearly every day: hauling the typewriters upstairs, for obvious sentimental and technical reasons. We work on, rat, tat, tat, interested in a little story, uplifting but not too optimistic, to avoid necessary hardships of great political interest soon forgiven and forgotten. Only taken advantage of a choice (these things sound sometimes fantastic) a mere diversion from the class struggle capable of overcoming the caste barrier. Reduced to our condition in as many different languages as animal noises, a greyish film on the clusters of black grapes (in a rain storm one is tempted to try to prevent the chaos of moral catastrophe) in the grip of some fear, or of peace, or of faith. Still twitching, almost totally unknown in this surprising world; the most plausible as the most realistic wholly-isolated and mute element.

On the contrary: systemic things to eat and flowers; such are the times we live in.

Some reason or other, oh, what kind of explosion, dazed by all the abusive exchanges and effective devices for the solving (with documentary evidence) of all the various language rules. This should have an unhappy end and a deadly close silence, a stillness and terrible fear, so dependent on the atmosphere here round the house. The glorious fountain; just what I wanted [but later] and now all that good expensive gas, after which drinks were served. Finally the situation remained as it was, managed to survive the test: extraneous to hatred, a remote possibility, not more virtuous, down irrevocably among chimney stacks and wires.

In need of a new word.

In one's body nothing.

There is a bad mood coming on.

1995-12-15T12:31:00.000-08:00

Friday, 15 December, 1995

Shadowy presence in the room undressing, blood in your mouth, the goya-face. The scissors of dead women. Defiance. The death of Aase. Your hand as a complicit agent. Your hand inactive, switched off. Tool to be used or not. You are constantly asked 'how do you feel about this.'

Your body becomes a torn landscape. Back to narrative and intrigues. Photo of a policeman near a woman in a mirror in a bathroom. This means it's real and the ambiguity lies in the role of the camera. It was real the first time. The sheer quantity of depictions of violence. Now sex and explosions. Sounds of traffic or wind. Two young women sing "I see your face before me." Two young women. Stop-motion. They turn to each other. "Desire." Arching for the kiss.

Doesn't matter. You are looking elsewhere for the secrets of ethics and home.

1995-12-13T12:30:00.000-08:00

Wednesday, 13 December, 1995

An urge to come to language. This exchange of nothingness. Abandon processes of decoding or drift, and strike up like accidents occurring on them, their distinctive beauty exciting something moist passed gently, like wing-beats, into separate conversations. Harrowing explosions, our bodies written in white ink, hidden behind the stonework of slogans above them. A shared state of the abstract, not even the most interesting or the most modern, a secret to no one. Tool and symbol, free hand and supple larynx, physical features in themselves as neutral.

The color of the blond woman in the hallway. The sounds of pedestrians walking on stone steps outside. Swelling music takes you out of the frame, aware of the external influence.

Anticipation is imperative. Do not fetishize, do not deny, do not hate. Never any display of emotion, as an insult. The color of the blond woman in the hallway.

1995-12-12T12:30:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, 12 December, 1995

The very beginning, it already seems positively insolent in its immaculate elegance, so swift it lacked nothing. Deprived of all basis that guides or releases. The questioner, and so. Despairing of ever understanding the primacy of this simple, multiple, diffuse fact. The history of life somewhere else. Even the intervals laid out. So many bodies in each other, lying immobile and frozen upon the strata, together as if to applaud bad luck, and injustice, in the vague hope that something might happen. The dissolute Court Of France, no doubt. Only by little white clouds. The chimneys fall between the buildings and acquire a body almost exaggeratedly visible. Shouting and barrel-organ playing. Ribbons, buckles and flowers. Such obstinate moods. Quickly they suffocate, beautifully, clinging, hardly anyone can prevent, little bones and smooth skin. Paper, like a silhouette. The sky, in order to catch. A low monument, blackened here and there, the seated thin bars, then men who say goodbye to someone going away.

Orchids and wasps. The earth's last world. You have wandered in circles around the ailing or dead figure, pierced back to the string, in the eyes of everyone.

Here you are returning, arriving over and over again because you claim to exist outside matter.

1995-12-11T12:29:00.000-08:00

Monday, 11 December, 1995

The coolness of the evening.

Afterwards, at the edge again, in this natural position, like suspension bridges. The attainable at a glance, a now-weary régime, among the ornaments. Your pronouns, your nouns; unable to obtain a language to crawl inside of. A ring around the fire. A most violent incandescence to continue to poison the air with their lies. Epistemology is not innocent.

Confused. Still imbued with the daily diffusion. Being a snare which holds us up. Let's get out of here.

Indignation as a form of disobedience.

Ability, swallowed.

1995-12-10T16:43:00.000-08:00

Sunday, 10 December, 1995

To find the emanations from it in the dark, these troubles kept up with a density whose passages take us, not easily recognizable, as landscape. Understood, strictly speaking, as something recalling something else. Discriminating, limiting. To forget the dull, persistant, unbearable graces of depraved children for a little while or for ever. Those swollen, hairy stems corkscrewing over the heart. Open-mouthed, listening. The inexhaustible heritage, the everlasting disease. The form of religion without anchor, without end. That peculiar malady which ravages under its apparent vagueness. No transmutation in this unending procession.

With the purity of a bed of vice, the committee on each side (heirarchical, devoted, supportive, in adherence) would try to begin to attempt to reproduce. The motions of narcissism in spaces chosen for it. Engineers stay neutral, anatomists to be filled with masses, as so much iron. The products of industry left to grow naturally, trying to swallow its pill. Pictures are being taken of this forced abundance and decay, this simply expressive and more expressive uselessness. A serious kind of make-believe trails no loose end. Imagine dead populations. Elevated. Trembling with unsteady images. The places, conditions and techniques of those emptied and dreary bodies. The ever-increasing silence an endless source of ridiculous misfortunes, circular figures that lie scattered. Experiences without replenishment. Already worn thin by the inevitable, unjust, incomprehensible gas-lit rooms of certain fixed ideas so completely dominated by abstractions. A dream of other clothes which simplify, empty, purge into a dream of absolute machines. While all the material details are conjured in solemn procession or witness. Real iniquity with real intent.

And the world (it is only stone) has so completely covered us.

[this is hardly an invitation]

The foreigner lacks words.

1995-12-09T09:13:00.000-08:00

Saturday, 9 December, 1995

x blacking y silk z gold. To discover the various uses of things. Grievances yet in the practice of virtue, and various objects of luxury space themselves out and disperse, trembling perpetually from their labours. Passion above all else marking the boundaries, gradually abandoned, too ponderous or painful for science, the lantern in order about the whole business . . . just a member of the middle class. With an intimate yet inocent atmosphere. Hospitality, with a view. Low voice, all lapsed. Lyrical outbursts and appeals lost in a remote world.

Many non-entities. Pure, long-drawn the darkness, further away. Read passages from it in a low voice. Corruption in every form of elegance. The pallette, the knife and the bladders, the dreary routine at the point closest to their drives. To the other and back again, a movement that gathers and separates, insignificant details hooked into one another: a house, any number of things from zero, each distance neither length nor appetite, each distance gaining power over men.

Living and dying visibly, with the sound of a particularly burlesque idea of ordering. Logic: to live and flourish before it. Exhilarating to contemplate. Echoed in the water and again onto the underside, spread in little bits. Dark eyes, a tongue, finally gathered together and converged; wax gums joined together with brass springs. Some terrible or beautiful display and adoption. Smoke mingled with gold dust.

A lived, hollowed, warm space where inspiration, suspended for years, ruins, surprises. Shaken and sharpened and rendered almost clairvoyant. Cunning approximations of voyeurism. The past not just approved. To determine the mechanism, the strategy, the race to a past of symbols. The desire to escape from a hateful period. That soft, lopsided arrival of the trains.

The book like a litany closes again in front before she stops. The prevailing graphic emphasis of the territory follows one of these unsubtle surrounding objects. A few meaningless bits of marble. Existence spent in the shelter. In moonlight, furnaces. Red as burning coals, violet as jets of gas, blue as flaming alcohol, white as moonbeams. Blood echoing on the flagstones and risen into the air to meet a strange sky dotted with birds.

Back to the beginning of racial tradition. A larger scale has a calming effect. No bounds, lived constantly, not resting or brooding. Go on without making the same dangers enlarged or diminished. Criminals with a vengeance; we must follow them indoors, as if true privacy (our bodies, houses turned inside out) mistakes by carrying a comfort among the discomforts, revealed when simply held.

Irresponsible, insensible, poisoning memories which somehow stayed, still under water, momentarily interrupting the dark, a strange spiral reverence to a dream of the past, a dark ground with small fires kindled. The whole world caught in that sound, and then remain perfectly silent. Sorrow would gently take possession.

On to emptiness so we plummet.

1995-12-08T06:35:00.000-08:00

Friday, 8 December, 1995

A rather well-known inward emigrant knows the secrets of so many other hearts, other strings to the bow, heard at intervals in a place of deep seclusion. Inseparable, honored, but otherwise untouched. These violent outbursts on paper; when they reach our age (and who does not) laugh at the plots, the names of stars and beautiful racehorses, leaking rowboats, boys who can swim at the age of four, muscular pains and nervous patients. So often have they been praised to the skies or pulled to pieces.

Listen to the quiet rythmic beat rather ironically. Take a bit more trouble. All my adventures; so many harsh words. Found out the rest from books and things. Courage to walk through the silent things may alter, as Brer Rabbit says. No recourse but to agree, if quiet there were. My pity untouched, marked by flame, visible only to those brought up from the nether earth, who have no interior perception. Sunk down again, a safe journey home on the blood-red skin of justice.

The time may come to show real feelings; and if the sun shines, rather forward with so much admiration, to think, and write stories, and dare to name or touch, of that which will come. Ordinary people ordinary girls. Handkerchief soaked in some good scent, pleasure even now when I recall. I must smoke and smoke and smoke, and then the food, oh dear, oh dear, released from the somber scenes for a moment, something about the great wide world this afternoon.

The war between desire and common sense; sick of all the remarks and all the questioning. All the more precise and adroit because of this awhile, for the look of things. Easier to talk beside the open window in semidarkness (not much difference between noise and silence) and look at the moon from there in the twilight beside an open window. Some live coals in it, some coriander seeds and an ounce of benzine: all the visible things of this world. Sit here on a Friday evening and recall it all, word for word, scarlet in spite of all the precautions. (onto precarious ground, about blood).

The teapot stands, with the cozy over it, on the table, and the guests come in.

1995-12-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

Thursday, 7 December, 1995

Finding fault with the composition. Aided inspired multiplied, criticism from amateurs, necessary enemy, like the furniture, blurred at this moment, a hidden unity, becoming themselves on a shifting map. Bandages, walls, harbors affected in this respect, this stopping of time, dissolving them in fluid. Condemned to the irreplaceable experience of knowing it. This lack of events. Invisible traces, tombstones. Shining patent-leather boots. Clearly against the background. On both shores, trains. The gap opened up by the urgent needs of the moment.

There is no crisis. Living means wanting everything. Have always struggled. That's her business. It is buried forever. Everything has already happened.

1995-12-04T05:28:00.000-08:00

Monday, 4 December, 1995

Passed through a gate. Through but not out. Still inside a place with closed gates, a larger place, familiar (the way fear is familiar) and larger, a place of a thousand and one gates known indiscriminately, traceable to a humanist secondary education without passion, without haste, with its hybridizing qualities; something of a standard explanation, heartening news, the daily bombardment. Circle of bombs forcing a growing union, desire which impels and convention which restrains. Censure thought and admire the Idea.

Standing alone outside the gate in the midst of a small crowd on a country road, looking up at a light blue sky. Blue sky and pathetic objects. The single aeroplane. Scattered suitcases. Dirty socks in brown leather shoes. Hitchcock had it precisely correct: the hand in pocket, the faraway threatening tilt of the tiny wings. The tilt of recognition. Of intent. Hayfields mown and empty all around. As if after a religious service, doors opened, standing, simply listening; "congregated." Apprehended in the event of liberation, paralysed and anxious, frequently halting to see where to tread safely. Unused to safety. And now the falling visitor and no roof above. Suspended in an atmosphere of individual desires. Agriculture fallen away, leaving singular bodies of varying densities. Hanging in mid-air like a verdict: the propagation of some and the destruction of others. Expression at any price.

This encumbrance of presence preventing dissolution, beneath the flat post-event-trauma sky, the "blue" sky. Aeroplane gone forever but will always remain. In that signified blue sky. Beginning to fill up with the songs of volunteers in a rough line, dull harmonics like the hallway outside an operating room. Ragged marionettes in a "theatre of operations." Hi Ho. Hi Ho.

Marching on and on, until thirst expelled into the void after thought, hunger, voice and the rest. Dumb, absent, isolated. On into nothing: everything is free.

"White clouds" + "Blue sky" + "Green grass" =

= pleasures that are dead

= an ancient pleasure-seeking

= a painful sting

The best of intentions. Like joining up on the right side. "Army of Liberation." Hi Ho. Sprawling onto the fields to let the giant snake snake by on the road. The undulating column of bronze, moving in the opposite direction, rifles lowered, sunken mouths. Silver chains hung from necks, jangling. A ragged child with no pants stumbles, slows up a thousand bearded men with guns. Indifferent to the general confidence. A thousand soldiers meet a thousand . . . children and women (to use words) on a country road, and: not a single display of emotion. Only the silence of inward detonation.
Another way of putting it: our public places are filled with blood.

1995-12-02T05:17:00.000-08:00

Sunday, 2 December, 1995

Better than this intolerable effort to manage crisis only through the outside, so violently. Inexplicable handfuls, oh scatter away, at all costs to discard the book: shelter, supply, movement, evasion and breakout; guests of the same house, contemptuous and disappeared.
Affairs, night, numbness: atrocious uselessness.

Injustice added to the exasperation. Discouraged, raised upon a marble surface and to hang without stopping writing. Steal in order to get caught. Blurry terrain here, like her legs tucked under her, indicating the sincerest affection, with such vehemence. There are only vectors in the most rudimentary form, forced to abandon their own line of descent in the hope of discovering the true theory, at once natural and artificial: the wide, sloping pavement back to the same second-rate. Belonging to it. Able to postpone until now, has gently taken place an inopportune attempt. Generated, it nevertheless survives. In winter and in the middle. The same applies to memory: act at a distance, come or return. To fire in unison. To remain in the embrace. Controlling, moved to sudden enthusiasm, slipped past. Reality is what aborts. No lilies, no battleships. External facts, as they were reported. In order to designate something exactly by suspecting it. Many a furor is able to express another way of not knowing ourselves.

Activity, the terrain again. The old walls, space. All the same from inside. Specific performances occurring within and upon allow us to experience what we are experiencing. A sexual act in darkness. Vision made monstrous. Veins breaking through the breast know who Dostoevsky is. One's own body the final resort. Silence may be an accurate remembering, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition, audible but not acknowledged. The base and body of undiscovered functions. At sunrise after a night of sleeplessness, monuments become the functioning part, the least difficult or dangerous still-believing. In other words, the movement of the problem clear enough. The long snake of red morocco. (As if by sacrilege . . . etc etc)

Yesterday and the day before yesterday side by side in a gesture of defiance, in varying relations of dependence. No boots made without leather, nerve, brain, etc.

Morning and evening fitting together very badly, as a set of emanations, scenery within which to discharge intensities over distance, to make the ritual submissions of tears. Duets and trios and quartets. And anything else, considering.

Humans acting in this world.

To go downtown to the habitual glare of the night. Among others right on to the scrap, on to a garden metamorphosed, configured among these hospitals in everyday theories of disorder in narrative. Questions of furniture and decoration. Those bourgeois optics which blind. Differences operating within behavior can be located within this trajectory and a property like everywhere else. Crysanthemums appear, perhaps place the battle on the ground. Science journals and the newspapers distinctly and bitterly name the effects. The often brutish speed of any fullness. Mechanically caressing, suddenly dispelled, like an assault or abandonment. Natural, justifiable and inevitable; triggered by these losses.

Any bare walls later on, inured to the absolute silence gliding past in the twilight of maps and the disrupting . . . and invisibility. Calling forth the simple feebleness which real rivers take on. Dreamy vassalage to time. The distinctive mark of human genius. Producing a fair imitation of the object. To seek entry into what it parodies.

All the dark, majestic charmers spinning in their wide circles. Reiterated, performative, occuring in structured attentiveness to citational references. Mechanically bisected, implanted and rooted. Syntax without color.

Strategies and structures for making nothingness. A small touch, no more insipid than the rest. An excess dispersal of moving gestures around a table, exchanging old-fashioned expressions clumsily restored. All societies shaken by antitheses, strewn to pieces at the same time. Lost, broken arguments that will be repeated down the ages. Sedative promises of activity through objects; procedures that permanently alter their new idiom, vanish from sight beneath the ruins.

Flaws located in the hard metal object, in documents, in projects and through modes. Dust, soot, magnetic filings, while the stammering grace cannot add much.

Go downtown, approach this uninhabited region. Embody and document a long scrutiny under artificial light; phosphorescent fires against a dull, complex spectacle of dissolving.