By swimming in the great black waters, one learns to float in the dark
I've rushed into the black abyss so often that I know how to walk in the dark. And cutting off a thousand times, ten thousand times in a row the hydra's head, without kidding myself that I'll stop it from still and always continuing its sinister growing. Years believing or not in a birth made to let death get some sun, others spent dying it with vehement colours: we recognize each other.
For the moment, great sea wolf, we're rowing upon calm, clear water, stirred only by visions of shores where horrors, tortures and wars rustle and lie in wait. But our waves form only a vast undulation that breathes to the rhythm of our madness. Light and the dark passion will push us towards the end, always towards the end and further. There where I hold you as if our skin would dissolve at the contact of the other's, make of us a single invisible being.
Your voice is clear, but when that veil of sadness comes, when the journey has barely begun and you again doubt its end, how can I be silent, and how can I speak? In its time that sadness, my love, in its still distant and double time. As great as the darkness may be, there is no blackness that will make me retreat.
You, and still you.
By swimming in the great black waters, one learns to float in the dark. Buoy in the darkest night. Humiliating old age, health-care nightmares already ruled out; and the rest is not for now and there is no more possible solitude. Have you not understood what a gift of life it was that you didn't die a year ago? Cut. Departure. And the unknown that spreads out ahead for many years yet, if you want to explore it with your child-eyes.
Sweet confusion when the ground trembles in the sun and you vibrate against, in, around my body.
We won't leave the autoroute in Marseille, my love, or anywhere else.
There's no turning back, only a spiral.
Julio Cortazar, Carol Dunlop: Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, extracts from the book