The Book of Disquiet (68 page)

♦

And should I speak with someone far away, and should you who today are a cloud of the possible fall tomorrow as rain of reality over the earth, don’t ever forget your divine origin as my dream. Let whatever you are in real life serve as the dream of a loner, never as a lover’s refuge. Do your duty as a mere vessel. Fulfil your calling as a useless amphora. Let no one ever say of you what the river’s soul might say of its banks: that they exist to confine it. It were better not to flow in life, better to let the dream dry up.

May your essence consist in being superfluous, and may your life be the art of gazing at your life, of being gazed at, never identical. Don’t ever be anything more.

Today you are but a profile, created out of this book, a moment made incarnate and separated from other moments. If I were sure that’s what you are, I would found a religion on the dream of loving you.

You’re what everything is lacking. You’re what’s missing in each thing that would allow us to love it for ever. Lost key to the doors of the Temple, secret pathway to the Palace, distant Island forever hidden from view by the fog…

I don’t know where or when I saw you. I don’t know if it was in a picture or in the actual countryside, with real grass and trees growing around your body; but perhaps it was in a picture, so idyllic and legible
is my memory of you. And although I don’t know when this happened or if it really did happen (for it may be that I didn’t even see you in a picture), I know with all my mind’s feeling that it was the most peaceful moment of my life.

You calmly came down the wide stretch of road, a graceful herdswoman with a huge, gentle ox. I seem to remember seeing you from afar, and you came towards me and passed on by. You didn’t seem to notice me. You walked slowly and unmindful of the large ox. Your gaze had forgotten all memory, and it revealed a vast clearing in your inner life: your consciousness of self had abandoned you. In that moment you were nothing more than a.....

Seeing you, I remembered that cities change but the fields are eternal. If we call rocks and mountains ‘biblical’, it’s because they’re surely just like the ones from biblical times.

It’s in the fleeting image of your anonymous figure that I place all that the country evokes for me, and all the peace that I’ve never known fills my soul when I think of you. You walked with a light swing, a vague swaying, and a bird alighted* on each of your gestures; invisible vines wound around the
of your chest. Your silence – the day was sinking down, and jingling flocks bleated their weariness on the greying slopes – your silence was the song of the last shepherd, who was left out of an eclogue that Virgil never wrote and thus remained forever unsung, forever a wandering silhouette in the fields. It’s possible you were smiling – to yourself, to your soul, seeing yourself smile in your mind – but your lips were as still as the outline of the mountains, and the gesture (which I don’t remember) of your rustic hands was garlanded with flowers from the fields.

Yes, it was in a picture that I saw you. But where did I get this idea that I saw you approach and pass by me while I just kept going, never once turning around, since I could still see you, then and always? Time suddenly stops to let you pass, and I get you all wrong when I try to put you into life, or into its semblance.

It was in the silence of my disquiet, at the hour of day when the landscape is a halo of Life and dreaming is mere dreaming, my love, that I raised up this strange book like the open doors of an abandoned house.*

I gathered every flower’s soul to write it, and from the fleeting moments of every song of every bird I wove eternity and stagnation. A steady weaver
, I sat at the window of my life and forgot that I lived there and existed, shrouding my tedium in the chaste linens I wove for the altars of my silence.....

And I offer you this book because I know it is beautiful and useless. It teaches nothing, inspires no faith, and stirs no feeling. A mere stream that flows towards an abyss of ashes scattered by the wind, neither helping nor harming the soil..... I put my whole soul into making it, but without thinking about it as I made it, for I thought only of me, who am sad, and of you, who aren’t anyone.

And because this book is absurd, I love it; because it is useless, I want to give it away; and because it serves no purpose to want to give it to you, I give it to you…

Pray for me by reading it, bless me by loving it, and forget it as today’s sun forgets yesterday’s, as I forget the women from my dreams that I was never very good at dreaming…

Tower of Silence of my yearnings, may this book be the moonlight that transformed you on the night of the Ancient Mystery!

River of painful Imperfection, may this book be the boat that drifts with your waters until it ends in the dreamed sea.

Landscape of Estrangement and Exile, may this book be yours like your very Hour, and not be limited by you or by the Hour of false purples.

♦

Eternal rivers flow beneath the window of my silence. I never stop seeing the far shore, and I don’t know why I don’t dream of being there, different and happy. Perhaps because you alone console, you alone lull, and you alone anoint and officiate.

What white Mass do you interrupt to give me the blessing of showing me you exist? At what whirling moment of the dance do you halt, and Time with you, making your sudden halt into a bridge to my soul, and your smile into the royal purple of my splendour?

Swan of rhythmic disquiet, lyre of immortal hours, faint harp of mythic sorrows – you are both the Awaited and the Departed, the one who soothes and also wounds, who gilds joys with sadness and crowns griefs with roses.

What God created you, what God who must be hated by the God who created the world?

You don’t know, you don’t know you don’t know, you don’t want to know or not know. You’ve stripped all purpose from your life, you’ve haloed your appearing with unreality, you’ve clothed yourself with perfection and intangibility so that the Hours won’t kiss you, nor the Days smile at you, nor the Nights come and place the moon, like a lily, in your hands.

Shower me, my love, with the petals of better roses, of lovelier lilies, of
chrysanthemums scented with the melody of their name.

And I will die my life in you,* O Virgin for whom no arms are waiting, whom no kisses seek, and whom no thought deflowers.

Foyer of all hopes, Threshold of all desires, Window to all dreams.....

Belvedere that looks out on to all landscapes of nocturnal forests with far-off rivers shimmering in the bright moonlight…

Poems and prose that were never meant to be written, just dreamed…

♦

I know full well that you don’t exist, but do I know for certain that I exist? Do I, who make you exist in me, have more real life than you, than this dead life* that lives you?

Flame transformed into halo, absent presence, rhythmic and female silence, twilight of wispy flesh, goblet that was left out of the banquet, stained-glass window of some painter-dream from the Middle Ages of another Earth.

Chastely elegant chalice and host, abandoned altar of a still
living saint, corolla of a dreamed lily in a garden no one has ever entered…

You’re the only form that never brings tedium, for you always change according to our feelings, kissing our joy as well as lulling our pain and our weariness. You’re the opium that soothes, the sleep that refreshes, and the death that crosses and joins our hands.

Angel
, of what substance does your winged matter consist? What life holds you to what earth – you who are the never rising flight, a stagnant ascension, a gesture of rapture and of rest?

♦

My dreaming of you will be my strength, and when my sentences tell your Beauty they will have melodies of form, curves of stanzas, and the sudden splendours of immortal verses.

Let us create, O Mine Alone, an art like no other, founded on the wonder of you existing and on my seeing you exist.

May I be able to extract the soul of new verses from the useless amphora that’s your body! And in your slow and quiet, wave-like rhythm, may my trembling fingers find the perfidious lines of a prose still virgin to human ears!

May your fading, melodious smile be for me a symbol – the visible emblem of the whole world’s choked sob when it realizes it is error and imperfection.

May your harpist’s hands pull my eyelids shut when I die from having given my life to making you. And you who are nobody will be forever, O Supreme One, the cherished art of the gods who never were, and the sterile, virgin mother of the gods who will never be.

Every day I’m mistreated by Matter. My sensibility is a wind-whipped flame.

Walking down a street I see, in those who pass by me, not the facial expressions that they really have but the expressions that they would have if they knew what I’m like and the kind of life I lead, if my face
and my gestures betrayed the shy and ridiculous abnormality of my soul. In eyes that don’t even look at me I suspect there are smirks (which I consider only natural) directed at the awkward exception I embody in a world of people who know how to act and to enjoy life; and the passing physiognomies, informed by an awareness that I myself have interposed and superimposed, seem to snicker out loud at my life’s timid gesticulations. Reflecting on all this, I try to convince myself that the smirks and mild reproach I feel come from me, and me alone, but once the image of me looking ridiculous has been objectified in others, I can no longer say it’s just mine. I suddenly feel myself suffocating and vacillating in a hothouse of mockery and hostility. All point their finger at me from the depths of their souls. All who pass by pelt me with their mirthful and contemptuous taunts. I walk among fiendish phantoms that my sick imagination has invented and placed in real people. Everything slaps me in the face and makes fun of me. And sometimes in the middle of the street – where in fact no one even notices me – I suddenly stop and look around me, as if searching for a new dimension, a door leading to the inside of space, to the other side of space, where I could run away from my awareness of other people, from my overly objectified intuition of the reality that belongs to other living souls.