Always a place where it rains,
No life beyond bodies.
Killing human beings for fun?
Finding the meaning of remorse?
No reason to be happy,
The distribution of effort
Under the pale and nervous sun,
The indexed presence of the dead
The oppressed flesh, the old wind,
The night that will have no dawn.
REACHING CREUSE
A top-ten of remarkable trees
And the couples at the end of evening
(At the end of life, could you say?)
Far away, the magnificence of lime trees
In the June evening
And the strange sexual ambience
Fed by waitresses of the chateau Cazine
(We must get rid of the squirrels!)
A couple has disappeared,
‘They probably died between the cheese and the dessert.’
THE CLOUDS, THE NIGHT
Arrived from deep within my moist eye
The images moved endlessly
And the opening was narrow,
The covering was thick.
I would have had to see
My future differently,
Two years I’ve been drinking
And I’m a very poor lover.
Thus, the night must be passed
Waiting for slow death
That advances alone and noiselessly
Finds our eyes and feels them;
When death presses on your eyes
Like a corpse on the slab,
It’s time to seek the scattered gods;
The body pours out.
Ghosts displayed their harmful hands
Gradually covering the surface of the Earth
Memories moved in badly gouged eyes
Crossing the night like nervous infantry.
A vegetation of abolition
Crept heavily on the stone
(Unanimously, the prayer
Summed up the dereliction.)
April was, as predicted,
Like a tamed orgasm
A trip into woodlands
From which no one returned.
I had gone on holiday with my son
To an extremely sad youth hostel
It was somewhere in the Alps,
My son was ten
And the rain dripped gently along the walls;
Down below, the young tried to establish loving relations
And I felt like ceasing to live,
Stopping at the edge of road
Not even writing books any longer
Just stopping.
The rain falls more and more, in long curtains,
This land is damp and dark;
The struggle subsides, you feel you are entering the grave;
This land is funereal, it is not even beautiful.
Soon my teeth will also fall,
The worst is yet to come;
I walk towards the ice, I slowly dry myself;
I see evening fall and the world die.
We must develop an attitude of non-resistance to the world;
Negative is negative,
Positive is positive,
Things are.
They appear, they transform,
And then they just cease to exist;
The external world is, in a sense, given.
The being of perception is like seaweed,
A thing repellent and very soft
Utterly female
And it is that which we must attain
If we want to speak about the world
Just speak about the world.
We must not resemble the man who tries to bend the world to his desires,
To his beliefs
But we are allowed to have desires
And even beliefs
In a limited quantity.
After all, we are part of the phenomenon,
And, in this way, eminently respectable,
Like lizards.
Like lizards, we warm ourselves in the sun of the phenomenon
While waiting for the night
But we will not fight,
We must not fight,
We are in the eternal position of the vanquished.
Insects run between the stones,
Prisoners of their metamorphoses
We are prisoners too
And on some evenings life
Is reduced to a procession of things
Whose entire presence
Defines the frame of our decline
Fixes it a limit, a sequence and a direction
Like the dishwasher that knew your first marriage
And divorce,
Like the teddy bear that knew your fits of rage
And abdications.
Domesticated animals define themselves by a certain number of relations
Between which their desires are born, develop, occasionally become very strong
And die.
They occasionally die instantly,
On certain evenings
There were certain habits that constituted life and then there’s nothing left
The sky that seemed bearable suddenly becomes extremely dark
The pain that seemed acceptable suddenly becomes searing,
There are only objects left, objects in the middle of which you wait motionless
A thing among things,
A thing more fragile than things
A very poor thing
Always waiting for love
Love, or metamorphosis.
Before, there was love, or its possibility;
There were anecdotes, digressions and silences
There was your first stay
In a serene institution
Where days are repainted
In a slightly cream white.
There was forgetting, almost forgetting, there was a departure
A possibility of departure
You went to bed later and later
And without sleeping
At night
You began to feel your teeth grind
In the silence.
Then you thought of taking dance lessons
For later,
For another life
That you would live at night,
Especially at night,
And not alone.
But it’s over,
You’re dead
Now, you’re dead
And you’re truly in the night
For your eyes are gnawed away,
And you’re truly in the silence
For you no longer have ears,
And you’re truly alone
You have never been so alone
You are lying down, you are cold and you wonder
Listening to the body, fully conscious, you wonder
What is going to come
Just after.
IN THE CLEAR AIR
Some people say: look at what goes on behind the scenes. Isn’t it beautiful, this functioning machinery! All those inhibitions, fantasies and desires reflected in their own story; all this technology of attraction. Isn’t it beautiful!
Alas, I love with a passion, and for a long time now, those moments when nothing functions any more. Those moments of disarticulation of the global system, which allow you to predict a destiny rather than an instant, which let you glimpse an eternity denied elsewhere. It passes, the genius of the species.
It is difficult to base an ethics for life on such exceptional assumptions, I know. But we are here, precisely, for the difficult cases. We are now in life like on the Californian mesas, breathtaking platforms separated by emptiness; the nearest neighbour a few hundred metres away but still visible, in the clear air (and the impossibility of reunion can be read on every face). We are now in life like monkeys at the opera, who groan and move about in time; high up there, a melody passes.
Swallows fly off, slowly skim the waves, and spiral u
p into the mild atmosphere; they do not speak to humans, for humans remain tied to the Earth.
Swallows are not free. They are conditioned by the repetition of their geometric orbs. They modify their wings’ angle of attack slightly to trace spirals ever wider in relation to the surface of the globe. In summary, there is no lesson to be learned from swallows.
Sometimes, we drove back together. On the immense plain, the setting sun was enormous and red. Suddenly, a rapid flight of swallows came zooming across its surface. You trembled, then. Your hands gripped fast the leather-coated steering-wheel. Back then, so many things could draw us apart.
ABSENCES OF LIMITED DURATION
I. To assess yesterday demands real courage, as I am afraid that by writing I will perhaps bring to light terrible things that would be better staying far away in my brain.
I feel like doing anything to get myself, if only for a few hours, out from this hole I’m suffocating in.
My brain is completely soaked in its cruel vapours, wrought iron and dirty deeds in the uncertain flashing of an alarm signal. Everything else is very dull next to this death game.
Facing the white landscape I feel abstract, wires removed from my head, eyes soft and flashing like siren lights.
On the 18th: I crossed a new threshold of horror. I have only one urgent desire, which is to leave all these people. To live apart from others as much as possible.
II. Now I suffer all day, gently, lightly, but with a few horrible spikes that plunge into the heart, unpredictable and inevitable, at one instant I twist with suffering, and then I return, teeth chattering, to normal pain.
The sensation of an organ being torn out if I stop writing. I deserve the abattoir.
Victory! I cry like a little child! The tears flow! They flow! …
Around eleven I had a few moments of cordial relations with nature.
Black sunglasses in a tuft of grass.
Bandaged, in front of some yoghurt, in a steel mill.
I wait for the pain to pass while dabbing myself with Betadine Scrub.
A dice is thrown, my lord Snake, you need only throw a dice.
III. And what comes next. Nothing very interesting. What could I say that would not be personal?
As though on the keyboard of my intelligence, Maxwell’s equations return in useless variations, I decide to light another cigarette.
This evening, I have decided to move on to three Halcion pills. The development is undoubtedly inevitable. In a way, it is rather annoying to note that I have kept the capacity to hope.
To exist, to perceive.
To exist, to perceive,
To be a sort of perceptive residue (if that can be said)
In the departure hall of Roissy Terminal 2D,
Waiting for a flight to Alicante
Where my life will continue
For a few more years
In the company of my little dog
And of joys (briefer and briefer)
And of a regular increase in suffering
In those years immediately preceding death.
FAR FROM HAPPINESS
Far from happiness.
To be in a state close to despair, yet unable to reach it.
A life both complicated and without interest.
Not linked to the world.
Useless landscapes of silence.
A love. Only one. Violent and definitive. Broken.
The world is disenchanted.
All that has the nature of appearance has the nature of cessation. Yes. And so? I loved her. I love her. From the very first second this love was perfect, complete. You cannot really say that love appears; rather, it manifests itself. If you believe in reincarnation, the phenomenon becomes explicable. The joy of finding again someone you have already met, who you have always already met, forever, in an infinity of previous incarnations.
If you don’t believe in it, it is a mystery.
I don’t believe in reincarnation. Or, rather, I don’t want to know.
To lose love is to also lose yourself. Personality disappears. You no longer want to have, you no longer even envisage having, a personality. You are nothing more, strictly speaking, than suffering.
It also means, according to different modalities, losing the world. The link breaks immediately, right from the first few seconds. At first the universe is foreign. Then, gradually, it becomes hostile. It too is suffering. There is nothing left but suffering.
And still we hope.
Knowledge does not bring suffering. It would be incapable of it. It is, precisely, meaningless.
For the same reasons, it cannot bring happiness. All it can bring is a certain relief. And this relief, at first very weak, gradually becomes nothing. In conclusion, I have been able to find no reason for seeking knowledge.
Sudden – and apparently definitive – impossibility of being interested in any political issue.
All that is not purely affective becomes meaningless. Farewell to reason. No more head. Just a heart.
Love, others.
Sentimentality improves man, even when it is unhappy. But, in that case, it improves him by killing him.
There exist perfect, accomplished, reciprocal and durable loves. Durable in their reciprocity. That is a supremely enviable state, everyone can sense it; yet, paradoxically, they do not inspire any jealousy. They provoke no feeling of exclusion. They simply are. And, by the same token, all the rest can be.
Since she disappeared, I can no longer bear the fact that others separate; I can no longer even bear the idea of separation.
They look at me as if I were committing acts rich in teachings. That is not the case. I’m dying, that’s all.
Those afraid of dying are also afraid of living.
I am frightened of other people. I am not loved.
Death, so malleable.
The universe is in the shape of a semi-circle
Moving regularly
Towards the void.
(Rocks are no longer insulted
By the slow invasion of plants.)
Beneath the ‘uniform’ sky,
Perfectly equidistant from night,
Everything stops still.
By the death of the purest
All joy is invalidated
The chest as if hollowed,
And the eye knows darkness in all.
It takes a few seconds
To wipe out a world.
Gone the belief
That allows us to build
To be and to sanctify,
We inhabit absence.
Then the closest beings
Disappear from view.
I have no more within,
No passion, no warmth;
Soon I will just be
My own volume.
There always comes a moment when you rationalise,
There always comes a morning with no future
The path amounts to a grey expanse
Without taste nor joy, calmly demolished.
SO LONG
There is always a city, traces of poets
Whose destinies crossed within its walls
Water flows almost everywhere, my memory murmurs
Names of cities, names of people, holes in my head
And it is always the same story that starts again,
Collapsed horizons and massage parlours
Assumed solitude, respect for one’s neighbours,
Yet there are people who exist and who dance.
They are people of another species, another race,
Alive we dance a cruel dance
We have few friends but we have the sky,
And the infinite solicitude of spaces;
Time, aged time preparing its revenge,
The uncertain rustling of passing life
Whistling of the wind, drops of water dripping
And the yellowed bedroom where our death advances.
LAST TIMES
There will be difficult days and times
And nights of suffering that seem insurmountable
Where we cry stupidly with our arms on the table
Where suspended life hangs by a thread;
My love I sense you walking in the city.
There will be letters written and torn up
Lost opportunities tired friends
Useless journeys empty movements
Hours motionless under a torrid sun,
There will be the fear that follows me wordless
Who approaches me, who looks me straight on
And her smile is beautiful, her steps slow and tenacious
She has memory in her crystal eyes
She has my future in her metal hands
She descends on the world like a halo of ice.
There will be death you know it my love
There will be disaster and the final days
We never forget anything, words and faces
Float joyfully as far as the last shore
There will be regret, then a very deep sleep.
A steel triangle severs the landscape
VARIATION 49: THE FINAL JOURNEY
A steel triangle severs the landscape;
The plane halts above the clouds.
Altitude 8000. The travellers get off:
They look down upon the Andes Cordillera
And in the thin air a storm’s umbilical cord
Develops and twists;
It rises from the valleys like a dark prophecy,
Like a breath of death.
Our eyes entangle, interrogate in vain
The thickness of space
Whose fatal whiteness surrounds our hands
Like a halo of ice.
Santiago de Chile, 11 December
The first time I made love was on a beach,
Somewhere in Greece
Night had fallen
That may seem romantic
A bit exaggerated
But it’s true all the same.
And there were waves,
Always waves
Their sound was very soft
My fate was vague.
Unreconciled Page 3
