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.

#

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.