The Absolute Gravedigger
Page 6
In a painted
House
With drawn curtains
38
Across the blackboard
In a dance hall
Grapevine
Decorating the walls
A hand
Hirsute and clawed
Moves
Squeezing a sponge
And erasing
Names of the lovers
Of the marksman
Who stands
Legs apart
In the corner
Taking aim at an ancient
Grandfather clock
Its hands
At
Quarter past twelve
39
In the mill
Whose sluice
Is full
Of pinkish milk
On which floats
A black handkerchief
A Venetian doge walks
With a kerosene lamp
From flour bin to flour bin
Looking
For his white
Silk underwear
While the pretty miller girl
Lulled by the hum of the mill
Mindlessly breaks
The teeth of a comb
Jabbed
Into a curly wig
On the night table
Next to the wide bed
In the shape of a gondola
Ready
To float
Down the tunnel of a black subterranean river
40
In a greenhouse
On whose transparent panes
Glitter
Holy icons
Installed
In tribute to carnations
An athletic gardener
Takes off
His high boots
And warms
His numb feet
Over tongues of flames
Sprouting from the ground
Bloodshotting
The eyes
Of this man
Face haggard
Covered
In thick black beard
The moment
He stabs
The ground
With a long
Sharp
Knife
41
A carriage
Made
Of skulls
And shinbones
That form
A decorative canopy
Rattles
Down a road
That converges
And ends
With a simple door
Plastered with lime
Bearing
A fancy sign
Visible from afar
Made
From colored wax
And interpretable
In two ways
Even though
It expresses
A very simple
And very cryptic phrase
TODAY AN EXPLOSION
42
Two Sisters of Charity
Holding above their heads
Open umbrellas
Each at one end
Of the footbridge
The sleepwalker crosses
Carefully conceal the sun
With those two
Almost holey
Parasols
And wait
For the moon
Above the deep darkness
Their fair hair
Glitters in
To rise
To lead
Happily
The somnambulist
With brooding eyes
To their
Quivering
Charitably outstretched
Fingertips
In which
Is concentrated
The brilliant spark
Of sudden awakening
43
In the bizarre town
The gates close
Leading to the four cardinal points
East
West
North
And south
The dwarf condors awaken
With a frantic caw
They beat their beaks
Against their cages
Where hands spin
Marking time
The condors bleed
After attempted suicides
And the shadows
Of naked men and naked women
Covering the square
Shrouded in ebony night
Tread in pools of blood
Of blackening twilight
Leaving tracks
That end
On the marble stairs
Leading
To infinity
DECALCOMANIA
Bear in mind that I write these lines in a state of extreme arousal. A dual manic stream at once intersected its drunken deltas, like rotting gloves, in my head, which, no longer like a puppet's head rolling its pupils inside the whites of its delirious eyes, floats through the room more like a storm-tossed tuft of hair. The pupils twinkling under this tuft, having indefinitely postponed the moment a comb would tame it (and now not the crest of a wave but an ivory comb that will make these muddled creatures look presentable and bring a bit of order to their unruly thoughts spattered by genius), fleetingly observe the dance of midges as if they would like to decipher in passing, being in thrall to a higher necessity, the obsessive image attained so absurdly.
Only the circumstance that I decided to sit at my desk (besides, I get up from it often enough to pluck at the violin acquired last night purely by chance without the slightest inclination to check the tuning but for reasons I wish to remain ignorant of as long as that manic cyclone continues to rage around me), and the fact that I declined to roam through the city, which around three o'clock is best suited for us to doze our way through the crooked streets, indicates that this room on the fourth floor, from which I usually flee to avoid performing tasks I might have set for myself or have been set for me (I dread work above all else), was no longer a determinate place for me and instead had become an ostrich egg, if not a bed circumnavigating the Greenland Sea.
But also the circumstance that just a moment ago I was using a flannel cloth to clean by chance this most errant fish of a violin that remembers the times startled by the songs of Ossian, as I had mounted a bridge on the creature (believe me, I have no mind to learn how to play it again and catch girls by their pigtails), and my pained adrenal glands are excellent sidereal signs that now might be the right time to steady a drop of mercury – my gaze – over the several decalcomanias created last year during a sweltering summer at an hour when this adored heat should have given me absolution on the bank of a swollen river among children throwing crayfish into each other's hair.
No sooner had I dug out from somewhere in maniac knapsacks a paint bowl to which my childhood had applied pre-Romantic ruins of castles and chateaus, no sooner had I cast the first starry tear of funereal black gouache onto paper suited to better things, no sooner had I applied to this flooded muddy plane a second sheet of paper, no sooner had I begun to remove it as I let the back of my hand run over it for a while, than I was so overcome by a kind of sunstroke at the sight of the two flowing images that I let the window thermometer drop and the sun set on the drooping sturgeon skin of my swimsuit dangling across the footboard and extended deep into the night my manic activity that I can no better compare than to the physical exertions of love in which all my extremities were utilized (all of them)* to arouse as madly as possible the universal genius of painting, this time wading through the mire of chance.
So for many days, instead of floating on my back amid water goblins, I let scissor blades give the rapidly drying blend of unstable images the meaning that had automatically sprung from them before my eyes during my manic activity, which is beyond reproach.
If I have now, as the manic delta of this afternoon radiantly resting on the old violin waters the parched delta of my last year's elation, spontaneou
sly chosen to reproduce exactly these decalcomanias and not others (I have several hundred), I cannot deny that this choice is governed by an inexorable order, because, as I have now noticed, these decals have, without my being aware of it, directly influenced my imagination in such a way that it chose the path that led to The Absolute Gravedigger.
After all, how could the hermit in my decalcomania named "Idol of a Woman" (titled just now) not have influenced how the visions forming the aforementioned cycle and "The Iberian Fly" were rendered, when this hermit, whose left hand is a squirrel and prophetic head made of flowing lava, being at the same time runny excrement, is from the moment I defined him as such with my scissors and interpretive delirium a figural synthesis that systematically embodies in a single whole an entire series of concretely irrational, obsessive unconscious ideas that have spontaneously gushed out, a synthesis as corporeal and objective as could be.
And the same goes for the image "The owl man bathing in his own knee that forms a trough," which could not occupy my mind without influencing the crystallization of the aforementioned figures, that is, a figural embodiment – thereby concrete (and no longer in the traditional, psychologically meditative way, abstractly) and systematic, thus without the inclusion of other figural components – of the complex of obsessive and spontaneous concretely irrational ideas expressed in "The Absolute Gravedigger" cycle and ethically utilized in "The Iberian Fly." How could this image not have had an impact when at the very moment of its genesis under my inspired scissors it was nothing other than the projected image of my spontaneous fantasy, yearning to materialize in just this way and no other, when it was surely an expression of necessity that became manifest by dint of chance.
Idol of a Woman
In a landscape
At the bottom of an abyss
Where royal cauliflower
Of volcanic origin
Its roots clinging to the cliffs
Forms
Diluvial flora
Touched
By feeble light
Distilled
Through thick clouds
Dozes
With his back
To the idol of a woman
Shrouded
Head to toe
In a ciliate
Mummified toga
A hermit
Covered in forest bark matted with muddy soil
And leaning against
The oar of a bygone shipwreck
Aslant and sunk deep in a bog
This oar separates the ascetic old man
From the idol of a woman
While his hand transformed into a forest squirrel
Scampering across the wooden oar
Tries to make
In times of geological shifts catastrophically ruptured
Erotic contact
The belly of the diluvial hermit
Is
A smoking
Low volcano
At whose foot is stuck
A wreck
With bulging eye
Emitting a simple beam
Into the forest undergrowth
Covering the hermit's chest
Owl Man
The owl man bathing in his own knee
That forms a trough
Hides beneath his long beard
Flowing
Like a stony creek
Over his belly
A black-haired youth
Striving
To escape his tyrannical embrace
And holding in his left hand arm
Elbow severed
A cloud dog
Lunging
Into a deep pit
This black-haired youth
Who is actually
The owl man's
Athletic shoulder
Is a plastic representation
Of the relationship between father and son
Who
Inseparably bound
By an ardent embrace
Painfully tear apart
Their common chimerical body
In a lacerated landscape
At the foot
Of slate cliffs overgrown with horsetail
Eroded
By a prehistoric waterfall run dry
Monkey Man
The monkey man
With a fat orangutan body
Stuck
In muddy
Sand and primeval water-lilied terrain
Yanks from the ground
A pulpy shrub
And with his left hand clutching the distant shore
Tries to scramble
Out of this ground
That apparently once formed a seabed
Waves
Waves
Composing huge dolphins
But also uncanny sailboats
Floating toward the horizon
Kindle specks of light
Over their own forests
And over their own convulsing mountains
From black
Tiered waters
After the Cyclone
After the cyclone
As the wind carries off
An enormous
Partly tattered
Curtain of dust
With flying fish
Floating in its fissures
And as the lace
Of limestone cliffs transformed into smoke
Is so translucent
That it reflects
The hazy shadow play of the distant sun
The bottom
Of former lakes
Is covered
By delicate cone shells
And conches
Worn smooth by water
Into marvelous shapes
With grasses
Like peacock plumage
And desiccated stingrays
Fossilized
They form
A lovely habitat
For pearls
But also the head of a horse
Buried on the battlefield
Of deceptive nature's unruly elements
Magical Evening Landscape
The magical evening landscape
Bathed
In black lakes
Bordered
By vacant tree-lined paths
Will always inspire
The stars
With autumnal
Wonder-dazzled invisible eyes
If decalcomania is the type of spontaneous manic activity that causes one who is fascinated by the bizarrely modified appearance of external reality to stop reading into his own being and become an amazed observer of his self against the background of a nebulous obsessive image that has suddenly defined him, then this activity gives our consciousness, accustomed to speculative methods, an opportunity to observe, without its volition and without its consent, as an unsuspected and intentionally unapprehended dream of ours materializes, as a never-suspected desire of ours assumes absolutely concrete and visible form.
If the chance acquisition of the violin and its fetishistic adoration, by itself an irrational act, could have dispelled my rational thoughts so singularly to unleash in their stead a delirious psychic mechanism, this unleashing contributed not only to the interpretation of several forgotten decalcomanias, but also to the awareness of the intuitive method, unconsciously involved both in the creation of the decalcomanias and in the spontaneous conception of the figures of The Absolute Gravedigger.
Just as an interest in those alluring objects that by chance insinuate themselves into our path — called surrealistic objects — involuntarily revealed to me in and of itself the method to use to concretize the poetic images of Woman in the Plural and just as an obsessive penchant for aimless walks, exhilarating for the senseless detours that concretize the irrational tendencies of my mind, determined the spontaneous method I employed to create the poems of Prague with Fingers of Rain, last year’s summer days devoted to decalcomania dug for me a tunnel at whose end I saw the figures of The Absolute Grave
digger.
If in the foreword to the second edition of The Bridge I declared that The Absolute Gravedigger was to be the beginning of the second movement of my work, a conscious beginning that "strives to spontaneously and systematically objectify and concretize irrationally subjective images springing from associative automatism," I cannot help but note that this endeavor thus defined attained its first concrete irrational form in my eyes on the rapidly drying sheets of paper that were the result of decalcomania.
The hybrid creatures I observed with astonishment appearing on the paper under the imperative touch of my freely expanding imagination are identical, being their prototypes, to the hybrid creatures of the absolute gravedigger,fetishist, milkmaid,>blacksmith,plowman, Iberian fly, and the figures of "Bizarre Town." Once they awakened within me the alertness of "an active and paranoiac thought process" that madly and spontaneously creates a delirious system out of images springing from psychic automatism, they had performed their essential function and my interest in them could vanish, only to revive unexpectedly in the manic delta of this afternoon, where both their verbal interpretation and the definition of the method used to create this book have been found.
THE IBERIAN FLY
As the blood-red sun set
To the whine of factory sirens a summer Saturday
Cast a fishing net over dimming Gibraltar
A spider web of epic proportions
The spider that spun it coiled menacingly
Among the colonnades of three buildings at continent's end
Across from a tiny margarine factory
Workers were just exiting
Just then
As the last puff of smoke disappeared from the factory
An enormous fly stirred on a Pyrenean peak
A fly
Phantom
Whose body appeared to cover the entire Iberian peninsula
As dusk descended
The left wing of the Iberian fly was adorned
With generals' medals
And a sparkling gilded cross
Crawling with maggots
Grappling naked women