Count the present days until today arrives ( ME)
Fay had provided an antidote to those foul fumes and distant vagaries that were rusting my armor. Nights when holding my ideas among strangers made every day hard and uncertain. She seemed grateful that I saw in her the woman of sound mind, perfumed, and with large, painted eyes. I felt unreal and stripped of distinction before her, since she was so convincing in the role of the distinguished, over-civilized young lady she had chosen for herself. Her soft voice. Her precise diction. "In the old days (I thought) polite English was a style of speech that many American girls learned on their own and with effort when they wanted to be actresses. In Fay's case, it really stuck: she knew every move, the benevolent smile, the slightly dramatic prudence, and all the subtle gestures with which to interpellate the news of the financial world." But suddenly (it must be said) she would take a turn, and her voice would sometimes take a parallel course, like a flaming wick, so like life itself on Earth that it left one disconcerted. I was just an excitable boy, and Fay had a lot of the seduction of radio and TV in her blood. When I was finding it impossible to find anything to say to her, I'd see her walking down the street; I followed her with my eyes, walking along the sidewalk, intent on catching a taxi. Her walk was full of feminine pride, and she swayed a little, as women do when they walk quickly. It was still daylight, but the traffic lights beyond the Hudson were already beginning to glow in a pale green sky, reflecting off the dark waters of the river, while in the coppery light of sunset, the black line of the asphalt was gently disfigured. She saw me and came over to me: "You're as astonished as I am before you(?)," she whispered, as if we were both fifteen. The pleasure of non-intimidation, that was how it could be described, at that moment. I knew how she felt because I couldn't stop looking at her myself, and I looked at her as if, if I could just keep looking long enough, a SENSE might suddenly emerge from the scene. I stared into her eyes, not only because of the subtlety of her gestures and the dignity of her physique and the elegance of her beauty, which hovered between the exotic and the demure, and whose proportions were constantly shifting in my mind; a kind of beauty bewitching because of something that trembled within her, despite all her restraint; a volatility that, at the time, I correctly attributed to the discreet exaltation that must have come from the fact that she was herself.
Softly, the space of my small possessions hums back into the world when I get home. I'd experienced something similar the other day, and Fay suggested that maybe it was just my head. ----- But it really seems to me (I told her) that I'm inside a head (.) Only at the other end of the social spectrum, where it's impossible, or rather pointless, to see it (.) You know, there's a huge difference in temperaments and interests. A hierarchy separates me from the people I see on the street. These four walls of solid bone that I find at home, as soon as I take off my shoes and turn out the light, shortly reappear there on the street, following me with a gigantic gaze, my every step. Personally, I've never bought it, but the average reader seems to believe me when I say that this head is the incarnation of a god, an artificial intelligence, but from there to saying that it's my own head, no, never (.) A kind of air circulates in it, I say "definitely" circulates in it, like a poison, and when everything goes silent when I turn off the light I feel the shot of that head against the bone partitions that it rejects as the wreckage of a smaller figure (.)
ResponderExcluirThe air circulating in this head is the kind that lends itself to the divine combustion of St. Elmo's, in the center of which it unties and ties again into other waves, and hence, undoubtedly, its cosmic beach noise, within my silence (.) Such silence has a logic all its own. Let's see if it really is a vacuum, if I close my eyes and float through the air. Reducing all this to a matter of eyelids is obviously laziness on my part, of the penetrating and probing eye that refuses to be confronted by words (.) -----, I concluded. That night, after taking off my shoes and turning off the light, the entire Earth had transformed into a boarding platform, which I thought of with a minimum of terror and wonder. I embarked my breath upon it and spent the two days of the weekend in an unforgettable state of which we will never know anything.
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ResponderExcluir---The retreat (I explained to Fay) was too great within my bones, or perhaps not so great, or I don't even know anymore, except that it allowed me to resolve everything and end everything(.) Everything I say is about a lesser degree of sayable things, which were not really within the scope of speech(.) Like a landslide of sand in the place of my absence, in the period in which time passed suppressed. Nothing remaining fixed in that great cosmic head except the widening of my eyes, before letting the curtain of time fall over them, in the form of eyelids. (.) -----, I said. Anyway, but I should have told her too that all those sensations were long familiar to me. I was remembering now: the Moon, not far from my gaze, round as a traffic light. But why talk about these periods of liquefaction when I pass into a state of lunar vegetation? It's not so much Faustian aspiration or psychic vampirism, but rather a scorched-earth strategy that makes me detail everything I don't understand after I've done it. But I do it anyway: and certainly all these little ideas come out of that great Moon head, like arrows. After I escape to the bliss of oblivion, I recognize such thoughts crashing against other walls. Still, they show signs of broad reflection.
And out of a keen sense of deference, I make them all pour out of me, groaning, right in the charnel house. Most of them hook onto my skeleton and swell me, until they're completely drained. And by swelling me, they swell my legend. Then they infiltrate the stories I've told myself endlessly since childhood. I always wonder what has changed since then to keep me so horribly excited, like a lunatic. That's it, then. I can't answer that question. And I can't stop either. Nothing more of the "I and the Universe" remains in me besides that. And yet it seems to me that every day I am born again, live long, and then die... Ultra specie aeternitas. Not a man of my own time, but with access to the centralized data mechanism within the Great Head that will bring forth the New Adam. Well, something quite strange, by the way. Especially considering I brought him into being in a single weekend.
ResponderExcluirThe truth!, but found by approximation, beating it with the bones. The bones of the head. New worlds? Not so much, no. Happy? Never, never! But with a sense of the mystical power of the human race to avoid certain prototypes of ignorance. More precisely, that which makes men say to themselves: "Come on, life... we must enjoy it (.)" Very simple matters. Say what you will, but when Wagner was the avant-garde of symbolism, the Germans, unbearably oppressed by the fact of being German, used him as one uses hashish. It was the background music to a "pogrom." Ah, my little distractions. They really exist.
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