E T E L A D N A N
Still from I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another. Courtesy LUX
"Poets used to walk across countries; they now sit motionless."
Seasons
O the Syrian desert mounted by its young emperors in the steel
days of Rome! Its salt has melted in the Euphrates. Further north
the spring has planted miles of orchards. Frantic flowers whisper
to the wind. Birds use corridors of air within the air for their flight.
Their shadows come from the soul. It is necessary not to stay still;
the voyage is family.
Shiny red peppers! Green peppers! Women walk between
tomatoes and leeks, in a season of war; that's not unusual. It's
rather like swimming in the summer. Things move fast in a world
of silence and disruption. In the morning, pushing dreams aside,
it's good to take a walk down alleys linden trees, vegetable
gardens.
Writing: the body's imprint on wet sand. Spring is element of
thinking; perfect tool. Poetry is a question of speed and time,
speed and time. For insomniacs, mind — while all other things are
excluded — plays games with itself. Then language, in those nights,
reveals itself as being our essential self. In dreams, we fly as fast as
we think, and we're rather happy.
When the world and the mind face each other with ultimate
intensity, they cannot cancel out. With its electrical system broken down,
the body doesn't qualify anymore for a name. One can then water
the garden with wine.
Eucalyptus doesn't grow for the shade it provides but for sheer
pleasure. Plane trees spend their nights on the county's lower
meadows. During the winter their branches burn in the
woodstoves. Silence falls gradually. Sleep becomes another form
of awareness.
Small towns suit the full moon. In the bars, loud music increases
the nature weariness of the customers. The season is undamaged
but there's danger in the grass. An apprehension of things to come.
That woman doesn't shoot heroin, being naturally high. Fate is
cruel and its damage irreparable.
Women enter their bed with their lover and feel their loneliness.
There's mystery to their flesh. On Saturn's moons a watery stuff
has been found. This night is not a night although it's not a day.
It's late at night. In a matter of a few hours a motion picture
has covered the lives of a bunch of people. In the same lapse of
time the air has hardly stirred, the trees have hardly grown and the
animals in the surrounding farms have not turned in their sleep.
The season is passing by.
A silver box on a table was considered one's Greek temple. To
teach the Veil's other side one needs to already by there. Obviously.
Winter is mystic season: a time for the transmutation of the cold
into intimacy; of terror, into certitude. Old Tolstoy, where are you,
you who knew departure on trains as liberation?
Are we a dream, a nightmare, a fulfillment? The desire for
permanence has given way to the eminence of the ephemeral.
That's why air drafts, dance, cinema or fire are privileged; they
disappear as they come. To be is a process that we're searching for
while it's already here. We are the looking, the heat, and the
voyage.
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E T E L A D N A N
Seasons
