With My Dog-Eyes by Hilda Hilst (translated by Adam Morris).
Title: With My Dog-Eyes.
Author: Hilda Hilst (translated by Adam Morris).
Genre: Fiction,
Country: Brazil.
Language: Portuguese.
Publication Date: 1986.
Summary: The story is an account of an unraveling-of sanity, and of language... After experiencing a vision of what he calls "a clear-cut unhoped-for," college professor Amós Kéres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university, which he finds filled with pointlessness and negativity.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ The cross on my brow
The facts of what I was
Of what I will be:
I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.
The cross on my brow
The dry laughter
The scream
I discover myself a king
Sequined in darkness
Knives striking
Time and wisdom.
God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God.
♥ Amós Kéres, forty-eight years old, mathematician, stopped his car on the top of a small hill, opened the door, and got out. From where he was he could see the University building. Whorehouse Church Government University. They all looked alike. Whispers, confessions, vanity, speeches, vestments, obscenities, brotherhood.
♥ I like this one a lot. Adultery seemed to him in adolescence a beautiful word. Now too. After AIDS, less so. Light and bed was an inspiration.
♥ Stuck between walls
I'm myself and the die:
I live separate from myself.
On all four sides
A taste for alacrities:
The chance to be thrown
Down your deep tunnel.
He had understood only in that instant. And now never again? He recalled everything perfectly. He had gone like always to the top of that little hill. He liked to be there, where you could still glimpse some dusky greens, a hurried lizard scurrying across a trail, and if he turned his back on the University building he saw fields of cotton and coffee. He would stay there just looking. Emptied. Sometimes he would ponder his modest destiny. Had he cherished any illusions? When he was younger, he wanted a nonobvious to be demonstrated, a short and harmonious equation that would scintillate the as-yet unexplained. Words. These were the fine veins that he had never managed to wholly extract from the mass of hard and rough earth where they lay deposited. He didn't want deceiving effects, or simply sonorities. As a child, he had never figured out how to explain himself. A hurricane of questions whenever he'd taken an aimless walk, just over that way to see the neighbors' dog or the flock of parakeets that came around in the late afternoon, I just went overthatway, that's all. They'd say: Why? What for? What dog? At this hour? To see what about the dog, what parakeets? I'd respond: Over that way because they're pretty. He'd blush saying the words over that way because they're pretty. Later, he'd get furious, when they'd ask him about feelings. How to formulate exact words, various letters brought together, chained, short or long words, to extract from inside himself those fine veins that lay untouched there inside him? They were there, he knew it, but how to extract them? Everything would come undone.
♥ Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top pf that small hill. But he didn't see shapes or lines, didn't see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning.
♥ The nightgown is pale green, cotton, the one that sticks to her tits, her belly, he thinks I couldn't have married or had a kid, and then the kid comes into the room: mom, dad is good at math, tell him to do this problem here. No way I say. I touch myself. I'm also in light-green pajamas. She's crazy about matching colors. I look at the headboard. In the middle there's a circular weaving, branchlike. What color? Light green. I feel a bit nauseous. All beds should be dynamited. This one. I look at the back of my hands, the veins seem more pronounced, I think of what these hands might have done. Carpentry would have been nice. Tables chairs, why not lecterns? Would I be kneeling now? Cots. Only one person fits in a cot. Those narrow ones. The boy starts crying. I say give it to me later. Amanda: what's the big deal, he did the problem himself and just wants to check? It's bedtime. The boy keeps crying. What a sham all this of kids and marriage, I think of a shot on the chest and the other one's still ranting eternally in her light-green nightgown, her tits, her thighs. A shot in the chest. It's necessary to love, Amós, after all she is your wife, he's your son. Go to bed, son, do it yourself, it's better for you. The boy leaves. Come here, Amanda. She doesn't come.
♥ Just what is it between me and Amanda? What are feelings anyway? How is it that they vanish without a vestige? Were they ever there? Everything leaves a trace. In death, bones, later ashes. Vestiges in an urn. Someone's footstep.
♥ She was all stiff. Like you were grabbing rubber, one of those rectangle erasers, but white ones. Disgusting feet, blocky, puffy. Legs one big trunk, from the ankle to the knee. Thighs like stewed melons. Pubis jutting out as though it were frightened of seeing you for the first time, and there it was, jutting. Solid Libitina, her breasts those of a twenty-year-old. She faked her sighs, and expelled ohs ays baby you're killing me cutting me like a knife you're socking it to me and other silly things, her little-girl teeth, thick gums, put your little books between my legs, she asked once as though she suspected some sort of defect in me, don't you want to? you want to cum on the thing you like the most, your little books, don't you baby?
♥ Ants. An animated and cohesive world. Superproduction. Silos. Do they have infirmaries? I'm ill. Short-circuiting. Little bodies running about in perfect health. There on the farm they toiled at night, on the veranda. Father used to say that there wasn't enough money to kill so many ants. Killing? they worked so hard. And how did those little bodies manage to move themselves? What aura hovered over those little bodies? What was it that made them walk, select leaves, find their routines, their secret places? Father would go scraping the sole of his boot over their ranks, and I would go to my room brimming with compassion. Those feelings. Painful, intense, pulsing without rest, my body a tremulous throb, a continuous living mass attempting to conceal itself, there was danger in life, there was danger in father.
♥ Life so colorful, mother, that they frighten me, these colors of life, I said early one morning while gazing at the magenta pastures. She looked at me like someone who understood. I wonder about those delicate women who marry crude men, always flushed with blood, vulgarity and rudeness, I guess they like it? But why do they later turn so dry, mute, my mother as mute as I myself, piety and stupor and from so much of all this the same old muteness?
♥ I saw words and numbers
Circles, tangents
Extensive theorems
On the slinky back
Of a tramp in the midday sun.
He looked at me between his rags:
Numbers, words?
Oh, no sir, misery is what it is
But my deepest thanks
For thinking me a blackboard
As they're just sores upon my back.
I tried to follow him.
He entered a hilltop thicket.
I entered.
Empty tunnel
Opening onto everything I've passed.
♥ And everything begins anew, the patience of these animals infinitely digging a hole, until one day (I hoped, why not?) transparence inundates body and heart, body and heart of mine, Amós, animal infinitely digging a hole. In mathematics, the old world of catastrophes and syllables, of imprecision and pain, was cracking up. I no longer saw hard faces twisting into questions, in tears so many times, I didn't see the gaze of the other on mine, what a thing it can be to have eyes on your eyes, eyes on your mouth. Waiting for what kind of word?
♥ Suspicions. Whispers that flare in the corners, at the edges.
♥ Around him objects, shelves, books, the kid's bike, notebooks, the little building where he lived, walls roof floor, and the old car outside, and the two beings he lived with, and drawers with some shirts and socks and underpants, Amanda's dresses, the boy's clothing, and me here stretched on the sofa, this woman's buttocks still warming my waist, and sweetened words, the sweetness of squash (want some?) and foolishness, a ride in the car (wanna go?) and senselessness, a cup of tea (want some?), whiskey (want some?). But is there any? We'll buy some says Amanda, of courser we'll buy some says the hot buttcheek, I reflect: after that uncommensurable experience there are only two options: live a pathetic, indecent life, transude obscenity, why not? Get drunk every night, and vicious, sputtering, shake my dick timetotime for Amanda's friends, plumed knowitalls, psychologists historians nattering housewives, wives of my horrid colleagues, and jerk off right between their thick legs, stiff and bright exploding with haikus, eh? I close my eyes. The second option: abandon house Amanda son university. Have nothing. Lean my carcass against a nearby wall and here comes someone: you hungry, man?
♥ They'll call the police. Right? Just because I lean against somebody's wall and croak? He of the cross, they ran him out for a lot less than that. Just for wiping sweat. Catching his breath. I felt the un-feelable, I understood the non-equational.
♥ I close my eyes, twist my face, disgusted. The world seems dim and fauve at the same time. Fuzzy and effulgent. Going up a mountain, eh? Gathering little stones. So many that they wouldn't fit in my hands. Little stones. Words? Words that another will try to put together to explain the inexplicable. My backside in full view. This complicates things. The wind of ideas uncovering the grotesqueness of our condition. Human condition. Dressed just like a priest. Pretensions of a life spent getting to know the sacristy. ..Later the sacristy. Priestly skirts, Jacinta's pants, the former raised, the latter lowered, and according to Jacinta: what joy, Libi, the silence and the perfume of saintliness, and so calm after, at peace with God, at peace with men, may they be praised. Praised be this quietude of mine in this instant.
♥ Mathematics. Fervor and vigor. And in university meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias. He'd leave, totally spent, despondent after listening to so many drawn-out tiffs. At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn't it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer? Like if you thought you knew every little corner of your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through which you'd passed many times, in the hallways my God, you discovered a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism. But they weren't there, I shout, they weren't there. And everything is a beginning-anew.
♥ Designifying
I'm melting the measure
I created.
Blotting the lines:
Circles
That all around me I drew
And where I lived
Distorted and trembling
Before the auburn of life.
♥ My equations. Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe. He's being hailed by physicists and mathematicians, more later on the eleven o'clock news.
♥ I say okay and tell him everything: the hill, the tips of my shoes, the ants, the pondering of sounds, and all that about incommensurable meaning.
I had something like that once. But I saw shapes.
What kind?
Polyhedrons. Shining.
And then?
And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist. I myself do not exist. I'm certain of it to this day.
Of what? I don't exist. It was a relief. That's why I can live with hilde. She, as you can see, is also a polyhedron. We don't exist, get it? We're very happy. Drink, Amós. Hope. Don't pluck green fruit. Drink. ..I drink. On the fifth glass, I try out a few poems. On the tenth glass, I finish them.
♥ The wall on the other side of the street. There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom. Frights. How do I feel? As if they'd placed two eyes on the table and said to me, I who am blind: this is that which sees. This is the material that sees. I touch the two eyes on the table. Smooth, still tepid (recently wrenched out), gelatinous. But I don't see the seeing. That's how I feel trying to materialize in narrative the convulsions of my spirit. Cursing and cruel, stained tin inks, those dark-dusks of not knowing how to say it, I attempt an amputee's step forward, a blind knowledge of light, an armless embrace of you, Knowledge. I go about drunk.
♥ Warmth in my bones. The sun's coming out. I grapple with myself, I set off a fight. I and my someones, the ones they say have nothing to do with reality. And it's only this I have: I plus I. I understand nothing. My nothings, my vomits, to exist and understand nothing. To have existed and to have suspected an iridescence, a sun beyond all selves. Beyond all yous. Amós Kéres.
♥ They forget. Models of interpretation. The logos is this: pain old age neglect of the living, then death. I was lucid and alert. And almost pious. I understood little of men and women. Of kiddos too. Little. Incomplete beings repeating idiocies. I am a child-person, lucid geezer, compassionate and sweet. Amós Kéres. Innocent as a little animal-child gazing On High. But they say the On High is nothing and that you need to watch your step. Your ass too. With a mirror. I'm looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside Amós, the Immortal, the Iridescent-Shining, the perceiver-Perceived. I'll say with precision what my noncomprehending is. Of majestic meaning. Colorful. Dilated.
♥ I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinity days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything's okay, we're here and that's enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world away in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signs should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man. He goes into a bar full of these unsayings, these so called whimsyings, alienations, illnesses, endocrine glands, Amós's struggle is only that, perhaps the pituitary, you see, perhaps the pituitary isn't getting on so well.
♥ A fever, he thinks. And that paradise in his eyes? Paradise? Splendor and emptiness. How did the Unfounded plan my death? Birds and roots. The highest and the deepest. Shall we look for a tree for our wings? For our growth. I remain mute. I read somewhere that they split the vocal cords of guinea pigs. So that you can't hear the screams. The howls. I remain mute. Throat swollen with screams but I am amputated. The slit ends nevertheless blackened at the tips, sounds softer than pianissimo, fingers over shamrocks, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the sleep of men. Is there a face exactly like mine? A croaking hoarseness, as unable and despairing as mine? Vertiginous-precise landscapes done with a Japanese paintbrush, and in them I listen to the sound of my own crippled gait. I cross the rectangle diagonally. Beside your portrait, Life. The facts. Acts. Sometimes we cling to the stones, other times we merely rest upon them. Some stone or another tumbles down upon our face if we gaze On High. We pass over to the other side. Of the triangle now. It wasn't the flesh that was harmed, no. Stones and shatterings. The sinuous slowly invading the rigid hypothetical track of equations. An S of sweet seduction. Of Shadow, of Sorbet, of Solution until, a thousand steps later, feet are burned in dunes of sun.
♥
Title: With My Dog-Eyes.
Author: Hilda Hilst (translated by Adam Morris).
Genre: Fiction,
Country: Brazil.
Language: Portuguese.
Publication Date: 1986.
Summary: The story is an account of an unraveling-of sanity, and of language... After experiencing a vision of what he calls "a clear-cut unhoped-for," college professor Amós Kéres struggles to reconcile himself with his life as a father, a husband, and a member of the university, which he finds filled with pointlessness and negativity.
My rating: 7.5/10
My review:
♥ The cross on my brow
The facts of what I was
Of what I will be:
I was born a mathematician, a magician
I was born a poet.
The cross on my brow
The dry laughter
The scream
I discover myself a king
Sequined in darkness
Knives striking
Time and wisdom.
God? A surface of ice anchored to laughter. That was God.
♥ Amós Kéres, forty-eight years old, mathematician, stopped his car on the top of a small hill, opened the door, and got out. From where he was he could see the University building. Whorehouse Church Government University. They all looked alike. Whispers, confessions, vanity, speeches, vestments, obscenities, brotherhood.
♥ I like this one a lot. Adultery seemed to him in adolescence a beautiful word. Now too. After AIDS, less so. Light and bed was an inspiration.
♥ Stuck between walls
I'm myself and the die:
I live separate from myself.
On all four sides
A taste for alacrities:
The chance to be thrown
Down your deep tunnel.
He had understood only in that instant. And now never again? He recalled everything perfectly. He had gone like always to the top of that little hill. He liked to be there, where you could still glimpse some dusky greens, a hurried lizard scurrying across a trail, and if he turned his back on the University building he saw fields of cotton and coffee. He would stay there just looking. Emptied. Sometimes he would ponder his modest destiny. Had he cherished any illusions? When he was younger, he wanted a nonobvious to be demonstrated, a short and harmonious equation that would scintillate the as-yet unexplained. Words. These were the fine veins that he had never managed to wholly extract from the mass of hard and rough earth where they lay deposited. He didn't want deceiving effects, or simply sonorities. As a child, he had never figured out how to explain himself. A hurricane of questions whenever he'd taken an aimless walk, just over that way to see the neighbors' dog or the flock of parakeets that came around in the late afternoon, I just went overthatway, that's all. They'd say: Why? What for? What dog? At this hour? To see what about the dog, what parakeets? I'd respond: Over that way because they're pretty. He'd blush saying the words over that way because they're pretty. Later, he'd get furious, when they'd ask him about feelings. How to formulate exact words, various letters brought together, chained, short or long words, to extract from inside himself those fine veins that lay untouched there inside him? They were there, he knew it, but how to extract them? Everything would come undone.
♥ Poetry and mathematics. The black stone structure breaks and you see yourself in a saturation of lights, a clear-cut unhoped-for. A clear-cut unhoped-for was what he felt and understood at the top pf that small hill. But he didn't see shapes or lines, didn't see contours or lights, he was invaded by colors, life, a flashless dazzling, dense, comely, a sunburst that was not fire. He was invaded by incommensurable meaning. He could say only that. Invaded by incommensurable meaning.
♥ The nightgown is pale green, cotton, the one that sticks to her tits, her belly, he thinks I couldn't have married or had a kid, and then the kid comes into the room: mom, dad is good at math, tell him to do this problem here. No way I say. I touch myself. I'm also in light-green pajamas. She's crazy about matching colors. I look at the headboard. In the middle there's a circular weaving, branchlike. What color? Light green. I feel a bit nauseous. All beds should be dynamited. This one. I look at the back of my hands, the veins seem more pronounced, I think of what these hands might have done. Carpentry would have been nice. Tables chairs, why not lecterns? Would I be kneeling now? Cots. Only one person fits in a cot. Those narrow ones. The boy starts crying. I say give it to me later. Amanda: what's the big deal, he did the problem himself and just wants to check? It's bedtime. The boy keeps crying. What a sham all this of kids and marriage, I think of a shot on the chest and the other one's still ranting eternally in her light-green nightgown, her tits, her thighs. A shot in the chest. It's necessary to love, Amós, after all she is your wife, he's your son. Go to bed, son, do it yourself, it's better for you. The boy leaves. Come here, Amanda. She doesn't come.
♥ Just what is it between me and Amanda? What are feelings anyway? How is it that they vanish without a vestige? Were they ever there? Everything leaves a trace. In death, bones, later ashes. Vestiges in an urn. Someone's footstep.
♥ She was all stiff. Like you were grabbing rubber, one of those rectangle erasers, but white ones. Disgusting feet, blocky, puffy. Legs one big trunk, from the ankle to the knee. Thighs like stewed melons. Pubis jutting out as though it were frightened of seeing you for the first time, and there it was, jutting. Solid Libitina, her breasts those of a twenty-year-old. She faked her sighs, and expelled ohs ays baby you're killing me cutting me like a knife you're socking it to me and other silly things, her little-girl teeth, thick gums, put your little books between my legs, she asked once as though she suspected some sort of defect in me, don't you want to? you want to cum on the thing you like the most, your little books, don't you baby?
♥ Ants. An animated and cohesive world. Superproduction. Silos. Do they have infirmaries? I'm ill. Short-circuiting. Little bodies running about in perfect health. There on the farm they toiled at night, on the veranda. Father used to say that there wasn't enough money to kill so many ants. Killing? they worked so hard. And how did those little bodies manage to move themselves? What aura hovered over those little bodies? What was it that made them walk, select leaves, find their routines, their secret places? Father would go scraping the sole of his boot over their ranks, and I would go to my room brimming with compassion. Those feelings. Painful, intense, pulsing without rest, my body a tremulous throb, a continuous living mass attempting to conceal itself, there was danger in life, there was danger in father.
♥ Life so colorful, mother, that they frighten me, these colors of life, I said early one morning while gazing at the magenta pastures. She looked at me like someone who understood. I wonder about those delicate women who marry crude men, always flushed with blood, vulgarity and rudeness, I guess they like it? But why do they later turn so dry, mute, my mother as mute as I myself, piety and stupor and from so much of all this the same old muteness?
♥ I saw words and numbers
Circles, tangents
Extensive theorems
On the slinky back
Of a tramp in the midday sun.
He looked at me between his rags:
Numbers, words?
Oh, no sir, misery is what it is
But my deepest thanks
For thinking me a blackboard
As they're just sores upon my back.
I tried to follow him.
He entered a hilltop thicket.
I entered.
Empty tunnel
Opening onto everything I've passed.
♥ And everything begins anew, the patience of these animals infinitely digging a hole, until one day (I hoped, why not?) transparence inundates body and heart, body and heart of mine, Amós, animal infinitely digging a hole. In mathematics, the old world of catastrophes and syllables, of imprecision and pain, was cracking up. I no longer saw hard faces twisting into questions, in tears so many times, I didn't see the gaze of the other on mine, what a thing it can be to have eyes on your eyes, eyes on your mouth. Waiting for what kind of word?
♥ Suspicions. Whispers that flare in the corners, at the edges.
♥ Around him objects, shelves, books, the kid's bike, notebooks, the little building where he lived, walls roof floor, and the old car outside, and the two beings he lived with, and drawers with some shirts and socks and underpants, Amanda's dresses, the boy's clothing, and me here stretched on the sofa, this woman's buttocks still warming my waist, and sweetened words, the sweetness of squash (want some?) and foolishness, a ride in the car (wanna go?) and senselessness, a cup of tea (want some?), whiskey (want some?). But is there any? We'll buy some says Amanda, of courser we'll buy some says the hot buttcheek, I reflect: after that uncommensurable experience there are only two options: live a pathetic, indecent life, transude obscenity, why not? Get drunk every night, and vicious, sputtering, shake my dick timetotime for Amanda's friends, plumed knowitalls, psychologists historians nattering housewives, wives of my horrid colleagues, and jerk off right between their thick legs, stiff and bright exploding with haikus, eh? I close my eyes. The second option: abandon house Amanda son university. Have nothing. Lean my carcass against a nearby wall and here comes someone: you hungry, man?
♥ They'll call the police. Right? Just because I lean against somebody's wall and croak? He of the cross, they ran him out for a lot less than that. Just for wiping sweat. Catching his breath. I felt the un-feelable, I understood the non-equational.
♥ I close my eyes, twist my face, disgusted. The world seems dim and fauve at the same time. Fuzzy and effulgent. Going up a mountain, eh? Gathering little stones. So many that they wouldn't fit in my hands. Little stones. Words? Words that another will try to put together to explain the inexplicable. My backside in full view. This complicates things. The wind of ideas uncovering the grotesqueness of our condition. Human condition. Dressed just like a priest. Pretensions of a life spent getting to know the sacristy. ..Later the sacristy. Priestly skirts, Jacinta's pants, the former raised, the latter lowered, and according to Jacinta: what joy, Libi, the silence and the perfume of saintliness, and so calm after, at peace with God, at peace with men, may they be praised. Praised be this quietude of mine in this instant.
♥ Mathematics. Fervor and vigor. And in university meetings, asskissers, pointless rivalries, gratuitous resentments, jealous talk, megalomanias. He'd leave, totally spent, despondent after listening to so many drawn-out tiffs. At night returning to his studies, searching, searching principally for order, mind and heart integrated once more in those magnificent suns of ice formulas expansions expressions, Amós would drift sublimely over some pages, and wasn't it in a sudden burst that everything was no longer? Like if you thought you knew every little corner of your own house and then discovered, for instance in the hall through which you'd passed many times, in the hallways my God, you discovered a crag with mirrored surfaces or a black prism. But they weren't there, I shout, they weren't there. And everything is a beginning-anew.
♥ Designifying
I'm melting the measure
I created.
Blotting the lines:
Circles
That all around me I drew
And where I lived
Distorted and trembling
Before the auburn of life.
♥ My equations. Hopes: Amós Kéres, mathematician, proved today by scientific methods his conception of the univocal universe. He's being hailed by physicists and mathematicians, more later on the eleven o'clock news.
♥ I say okay and tell him everything: the hill, the tips of my shoes, the ants, the pondering of sounds, and all that about incommensurable meaning.
I had something like that once. But I saw shapes.
What kind?
Polyhedrons. Shining.
And then?
And then I understood that only polyhedrons exist. I myself do not exist. I'm certain of it to this day.
Of what? I don't exist. It was a relief. That's why I can live with hilde. She, as you can see, is also a polyhedron. We don't exist, get it? We're very happy. Drink, Amós. Hope. Don't pluck green fruit. Drink. ..I drink. On the fifth glass, I try out a few poems. On the tenth glass, I finish them.
♥ The wall on the other side of the street. There are certain walls that should never be seen before we grow old: moss and ocher, dahlias across some of them, lacerated, sounds that should never be heard, pulsations of a lie, the metallic sounds of cruelty echoing deep down to the heart, words that should never be pronounced, hollow eloquences, the vibrations of infamy, the throbbing ruby-reds of wisdom. Frights. How do I feel? As if they'd placed two eyes on the table and said to me, I who am blind: this is that which sees. This is the material that sees. I touch the two eyes on the table. Smooth, still tepid (recently wrenched out), gelatinous. But I don't see the seeing. That's how I feel trying to materialize in narrative the convulsions of my spirit. Cursing and cruel, stained tin inks, those dark-dusks of not knowing how to say it, I attempt an amputee's step forward, a blind knowledge of light, an armless embrace of you, Knowledge. I go about drunk.
♥ Warmth in my bones. The sun's coming out. I grapple with myself, I set off a fight. I and my someones, the ones they say have nothing to do with reality. And it's only this I have: I plus I. I understand nothing. My nothings, my vomits, to exist and understand nothing. To have existed and to have suspected an iridescence, a sun beyond all selves. Beyond all yous. Amós Kéres.
♥ They forget. Models of interpretation. The logos is this: pain old age neglect of the living, then death. I was lucid and alert. And almost pious. I understood little of men and women. Of kiddos too. Little. Incomplete beings repeating idiocies. I am a child-person, lucid geezer, compassionate and sweet. Amós Kéres. Innocent as a little animal-child gazing On High. But they say the On High is nothing and that you need to watch your step. Your ass too. With a mirror. I'm looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside Amós, the Immortal, the Iridescent-Shining, the perceiver-Perceived. I'll say with precision what my noncomprehending is. Of majestic meaning. Colorful. Dilated.
♥ I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinity days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything's okay, we're here and that's enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world away in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signs should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man. He goes into a bar full of these unsayings, these so called whimsyings, alienations, illnesses, endocrine glands, Amós's struggle is only that, perhaps the pituitary, you see, perhaps the pituitary isn't getting on so well.
♥ ..Amós, it doesn't make much sense to have the house up there and you back here, seems like it doesn't make sense, that is if things are supposed to make some kind of sense. Guess so, mother.
I feel like I know how it is.
Really, mother?
Your father once explained it to me without explaining. It was early in the morning. He got up, put on his boots. It wasn't a nice day at all. He looked at you in the crib, you were six months old. We were young and your father was handsome. Everything seemed all right. His eyes went blank for a moment as though you and I were no longer there, as if he himself were another person, his mouth gaping like he couldn't breathe and he said all at once: it's such an effort to try not to understand, it's the only way to stay alive, trying not to understand.
Doesn't seem like dad. You sure you weren't with another man?
She laughs.
♥ A minuscule heart trying
To escape itself
Dilating
In search of pure understanding.
♥ Look at this, the guy's gonna get hanged but he wants to catch some z's first. You're gonna get to sleep for all eternity. I know, but will I even know that I'm sleeping? And sleeping now, I'll know I chose to sleep, or rather, if you want to know, that I need it. A little further and then you'll sleep.
♥ The doomed man: This is the only way they'll sleep let me sleep. But if I sleep I'll relax and be carried off by the wind. Suddenly carried off by the wind all the way to the gallows. No, that would be the height of coincidence: the doomed man staggering alone to the foot of the gallows. The height indeed. But there are terrible coincidences. Yes, they can occur.
♥ To think the great discomfort
Of feeling you here, in nausea, in excrement.
To think myself to myself, also the prison of your body
Stretched in the black branches of this night.
To think that I thought of you as a flash and rice paddies. Seed.
And sharp dyes
Returning to the crumbled walls. And that I thought of you
As though I had only seen you
In the abyss incarnate with infinite lives.
And to discover that your means
Are equal to the steps
Of drunkards.
That there is old age and death
In everything that you created: suns, galaxies. And in us:
Animals of your pasture.
♥ I do a few somersaults. Mirror and boots. I'm a castaway from myself and a gardener. I'm in the depths but I plant as though I were outside. I'm an executioner in a classroom. If they ask me I don't respond. This is who I am. Somersault, cuddle, fish, silken tail, water, grindstone clouds in this aquarium. The eyes eye me. The faces lean their noses into my space. Mutely I roam through the room. There is a circle of glass between us. There are a bunch of people in the entryway: is that the professor? Begonia. I revisit the window in its yellows. We are questions in an extensive and inconclusive ball of twine.
♥ Women invade the room. They stomp on me with their high heels. Sado-slippery I'm sweating and laughing. Grotesquely I'm dispersing. There's blood spattering the walls of the circle. An avalanche of cubes blankets my tissues of flesh. I'm empty of anything good. Full of the absurd.
Lift me, Shining One
To the opulence of your shoulder.
With my dog-eyes I stop before the sea. Tremulous and sick. Bent, thin, I smell fish in the driftwood. Fishbone. Tail. I gaze at the sea but don't know its name. I remain standing there, askance, and what I feel is also nameless. I feel my dog body. I don't know the word, nor the sea in front of me. I lie down because my dog body orders it. There's a bark in my throat, a gentle howl. I try to expel it but man-dog I know that I'm dying and I will never be heard. Now I'm a spirit. I'm free and fly over my miserable being, my abandonment, the nothing that contains me and that made me on Earth. I am rising, wet like fog.
The snares: As if a dead man
Believed the sunflower of life
To grow upon his chest.