Unreconciled Page 3

  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.