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On the way from nature to being
walls are not really kind walls soaked with the urine of talents, walls running with the spittle of eunuchs in revolt against the spirit, walls no smaller for not yet being born, walls that enclose the ripened fruit... The supple ripeness of Shakespeare invites licence. It's meaning, which like amazement should be festive, with the decline of the times, (in face of the possible signs of his absence) becomes a supercharge levied on every apartment into which a director has rudely shoved his way. Fraud alone is certainty here. And the spectator, crawling out before his time like St George's dragon, basks in the bile of the critics... And those who dare to map desire are at their ease, though their bad temper shows that the brute is always with us... Nature is a sign which, if not mute, denies itself. And the male of the species, that opener, feels dumb simply because the spirit always moves forward while everything closes behind it... And he was like that... Hamlet! He had an arm missing and evening rolled through the empty sleeve of his coat as through a blind man's sex nipped by music... Nature merged our contempt for the town with the rock urine of mosses uprooted at the golden summit of power and waited for the caterpillar of the vine to change into a butterfly, but waited in vain, for he despised wine from the day he was driven by thirst to open a horse's artery and drink the blood... So he made up his mind to admit the jinn and exclude the apparently unrevealed mysteries, and caught between himself and himself to plead for the abyss. Afterwards he spoke only from its depths even when talking of a certain saint who no longer had anything except the pain of remembering an ancient love, a pain little enough to be easily hidden in a hollow tooth... It doesn't matter whether what we heard was the sucked saliva running from sleeping crickets' mouths, builders of midnight bridges, creators who made themselves double tombs, or phantoms whose wages is prophecy. Only art made no excuses... And also life insisted insisted dangerously that we would survive, though we might really wish to die... There was no refuge... Nowhere, not even in the unconscious... But he was there, Hamlet, who like a Mozart-tippler overturned the Alps in order to stand a bottle shakily on the creaking stairs of the fear of death, so locked in himself that all immortality could fit inside him... And it is true that in his presence the knife raised above a sheep would not cut and the melted pewter of old baptismal fonts returned to its primal form. Anxiety endures. He got in the way of eternity and had to heal the wound. He was in the grave of the father and had to be the child of the sons... He was face to face with the holy spirit of music and had to live for the takings of a whore or the price of a dog. Oh, not that he knew everything, for he well understood that when egoism overeats it doesn't throw up but digests and starts again - not that he was wise, like a single wooden pillar among columns of stone - not that he trembled like an aspen facing that ancient floor painted with menstrual blood - not that he was a miser, thinking of final things and living in King Atreus' tomb where the treasury led straight to the charnel-house - not that it mattered to him whether Alexander the Great's crooked neck had straightened out anything in history - no, no, but I always see his grimace at those for whom any mystery is a void into which they hurl all the fury of the castrated... He who gives is still a miser... But we who do not believe are always expecting something, and maybe people always expect something because they have no faith... They are enlightened but don't give light... They are thin-blooded yet for them nothing exists unless blood is shed, they are damned though not yet excommunicated, they are curious but haven't found the mirror in which Helen-Helen looked at herself from below-from below, and they are so deaf they would like to hear Christ's voice on a disc. Meanwhile everything, everything here is a miracle only once: only once Abel's blood which was to destroy all wars, only once the irrecoverable, the unconscious of childhood, only once youth and only once song, only once love, in the same breath lost, only for once everything against heredity and custom, once only the loosing of contracted ties and liberation and so only once the essence of art, only for once everything against the prison, unless God Himself should wish to build a house on this earth... A green hawthorn leaned over the wall scattering on the road the buds of its curiosity. The window opened the wind, bringing a draught: Your deeds are many and yet none, but to do and to be is the envy of everyone! Night smoked history, ate the fried wings cut from Mercury's ankles, and drank it down with the sweat of St Tragedy's organist... 'Only when you make your peace with death,' said Hamlet, 'will you understand that everything under the sun is really new... Our body is not a canvas hangar for cutting into strips... But our subconscious plays tricks... Even if we give alms, it is we who profit! So it is when we make love in error... Yet no! The groping sex of human beings means only to have the relation without the man... And yet love's liver is found in sin. The tensing of the body reminds you of the profaning and chastisement of the spirit... Even in the presence of the sleeping we are not at ease for we do not know where they will halt, while we are stuck in our tracks... Consider how heavy a cat suddenly becomes when dead, while some man will spend the whole day shooting sparrows! Yes, there is the shame of a man and the shame of a woman. A man cannot bear to look at cotton-wool. And woman? No sooner born in the dry season, she is already flattering the rains...' In a moment Hamlet added: 'Children are never satisfied with an answer... They will play with a cupboard full of secrets and finally carry off the key within themselves. Or they are ill and secretly open the letters of an imprisoned poet who used to pay for his own little room simply because the letter was opened by them... Or when ill they see in their dreams a pillar of fire and cry: It's a bough, a vein of God! Or in illness cannot free their minds of the unending handwork of women which aims only at keeping them warm and would weave a man into its pattern or else seize up... Or they are well! Every moment hands reach for the slices of bread... And when they run out of the barn they may trample on the last grain of last year's harvest so that soon they will be more tempted to crown the skull of fire with a sheaf's golden wig. They are as full of life as a horse that doesn't feel its rider a stranger but its own thought... Rejoicing, shouting, they have been a year together without regrets, they have a sure remedy for anything that's not a miracle - all stains are only mud-stains on a new dress and can soon be washed off... Children! They have found the true names, we have only to pronounce them! I interrupted and told him he looked like a mill-stone quarry. Have a drink, Hamlet! I said. Do you want it along with the oven, soul of the farm, or with the passion of the blood's cardinal points? But he didn't take it badly and said: 'Po-pa!' What's that? I asked and he replied: 'They talk that way in Tibet!' and went on: 'Virgins, ah yes, they know when a tree is unwell!... But I have known convicts. For some of them it's enough to imagine huge backsides, huge only because the leaden memeory of the same crime forces them to squat without legs, unless they are swollen from all the beatings, since they smell of tar... "There was no train!" said the woman. And the man replied: "It's worse when a ship is late, you, I mean, who like a ship leave in you under you a continuous line..." Yes... Whereas virgins, yes, they know when a tree is unwell... And the cloth of their innocence always covers the male graftings, even if their stockings are made from the hair of whores... Freedom, you know, is always kin to voluntary poverty...' Night overlapped night... It bowed to the earth or became a tomb for everything the living and the dead were doing... Maybe the living felt shy and were insolent... And the dead, envious, not deliberately but from heredity or vengefulness. I understood when Hamlet said, not knowing my thoughts: 'What only surrounds us now one day will bury us... Once I was present at a fire... One of countless flames was enough for me to notice that the whole hand of a fish-pond keeper who was there had only a single joint and to make me think of the bony sculpture of nothing upon nothing... The hair of a hanged man is more sensitive when silky on the spine and comes no closer to being than to the hairs of knowledge. But still more spacious for the shivering quinine of Elsinore was the sound of Ophelia cutting her toe-nails... You know...' No, I don't know, I said... But right now I'm expecting guests, I added, annoyed that he plainly liked his own misfortune... Again he was not offended and went on: 'Querer la propria desdicha... But what moves a mother would shatter argosies on the open sea... Besides... If there is no God, no angels and nothing after death, why don't the worshippers of nothingness bow down just to them, the non-existent? I had this feeling once while hunting white falcon... It also rises from Chinese tombs... And the tables of Moses say the same... But from an inverted humility or pride that is not yet clear - for the bellows are only now being stitched up - we would rather kiss a greyhound between the eyes and a horse on the hoof, and are not afraid to enter a library... While hunting white falcon I have felt rhythm, and, among the Ainus, gods, near, far, light and heavy... Besides, at the moment you are expecting guests and they are already here since they've come before their time... Yes, to see each other and talk together and feel a warm trust and heartbeat true as Rembrandt's needles, though each of us is different from the other (for that is what the soul does), and yet not to catch the serpent by another's hand. A jet engine is not for the poet... And as a tree remains a tree while it bears some fruit that ripens too soon and some at the right time and some still later - no, one cannot hurry with words for we do not nor have we come from the pitiable right of mankind to be human for man's sake! Effective love, you know?... The everyday is the miraculous... The greater the poem, the greater the poet, and not the contrary!' he added, And you are already a great poet if you ask yourself with whom you are to be lost... Yes, art as something that stops a swollen head... I tell you, art is a lament, something for somebody, nothing for everyone, for simply by hoping you are already in the future... There is always something that outstrips us, for even love is only part of our certitude... Atonal harmony... And pain as punishment for being a fugitive... Or is it that human aid, which might have helped, calls upon the aid of God? I don't know, but from the form of some people I have recognized the true proportions of an octopus...' The wind wrangled in the chimney... And in some grove ruffled the hair on a fallow-deer's penis... And somewhere in history it chased Raleigh's drunken galleons only to rip them apart, as your mother once impatiently tore her sleeves listening to Wagner... But you can't drive out the soul by drinking, like a gopher from its hole, for even if you think of it as so full-bosomed that you say: what reserves! - you are still a being, fixed in transitory form by the winged hate of man and woman. 'Salamander in the fire!' Hamlet broke in. And then frying the seed of the Word on the melted bacon of his tongue, hissed: 'What a poet writes, an angel or demon does... Thus dreams revenge themselves on uninterrupted consciousness! I am always looking for a free canteen where the little window would not be that of a prison cell through which the prisoner is watched, the peephole called the judas... "He that will not work shall not eat" True, but what is work? To be faithful to one's lot, unselfishly, or to sell indulgences or become a zealous stoker in a crematorium, stick a thermometer in the rectum of war or have to sing at the vintage to prove you don't eat grapes, examine a horse's teeth or like an executioner rip out the nostrils of the condemned, be corroded by vinegar and bile and take revenge on others or burn off a woman's right breast to make her an archer, to be the seed of fate in history's womb or the feeling that is condemned to forced labour under the grey Siberia of old heads - or on penalty of death to file off your fetters and rather force your eyes out than look at the horrors of today, and yet still hear the singers dead long ago, but free?... Composition's net at best gathers in the ornamental... I'm not indifferent to one little step or fall of a child in the nettles... If his mother tells him: Go and get some rum for the tea, off he goes, repeating: rum for the tea, rum for the tea, and ends up whispering: heaven for me... No, no, I'm not indifferent to the single fall of a child... Yet evil always rises up humanity's spine, spattered with blood like a dentist's staircase... Ancient and weary, at each step it recoils in disgust, yet rises again and again to the brain of pride, for after so many attempts by saints and poets, after so many attempts by saints and poets to switch off the current - it believes only in the moment of harmony when there is a short circuit between heaven and hell. But of course... We can also wait until something bursts and love falls on us... Maybe our hope is in patience and waiting. Imagine life's terminus... An old man stands there, cowering like words in the rain. "I'm 'ere," he says, "waitin' for a gent 'o promised me a room, said it'd be unfurnished - wouldn't worry me a bit - " It was raining. And the old man's trust was so blind or so openhanded that it saw a snug future for him and only the passers-by understood that someone had taken him for a ride under the mezzo rilievo of the moon... But you know how it is: suddenly nothing, absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing facing us like the moment when it seems the future is behind us. Lovers should be joyful! The universe, though as they say finite, is also unlimited... A man is suddenly sick at heart, a woman cold, instead of killing each other they come together, grateful once again to see something of their fate, though it leads with shameless precision to the poorhouse.' |