several nineteenth-century drawings of boats engulfed by seas that chill you with dread this is why I suddenly saw the night of time what indeed is the night of time if I am a thousand times the same person in different centuries somebody who has been folded small in the nature of
Homo sapiens
?
The city makes me dizzy with its voices surging out of insignificance and lies it absorbs me in front of the hotel the cars drop people off here and there like pawns there is always a church steeple a labyrinth of words the moving shape of a cloud an indescribable force that destroys strikes brutally while everybody tries to be themselves while I am me sitting at the Café de la Gare drinking lemonade with ice cubes because it is so good for me better even than if I had written all of this while drinking lemonade in a train-station café and had erased it.
People cry easily when tired you just need to look closely to see tears slowly forming then people turn their heads slightly as if to ward off fate I see that their nostrils their chins their foreheads are well and truly alive people act as if nothing is happening and I pretend not to seethem getting exhausted from holding back their tears then with a dry and suspicious eye they look straight ahead as if to warn about a coming disaster it’s like Tatiana’s gold watches glittering in the great glass armoire in the living room on days when this happens I no longer know if time is a light source or a misfortune and I say I must rest everywhere there are power and holes I’m right the power of stars wears me out for example when I lift my head even if it’s far it doesn’t take much before I feel the heat radiating in my hands troubling black hole this is what I see coming we can’t there are things we can’t do they happen it is frightening in my head the number of sights that make me want armoires all the more inside which I have to shut a lot of blackness all the blackness I am capable of the purest black ever seen an otherworldly black that attracts like light does by performing very quick magical somersaults something resembling happiness but in the other language this compares to nothing so I go walking alone on the mountain the happiness continues I talk to myself everything is out of focus around what I call the great happiness I must think only of ordinary things because images and words go fast like animals in the forest when they are escaping harm I get excited thinking about everything in life that flees in the name of life.
THE WATER LEVEL
…
and met her gaze looking deeply from the same waters …
Louky Bersianik
They were two sentences with water and light. I had imagined them and now I wanted to write them. The sentences were simple, they spoke of unforgettable faces and of a bridge people crossed on foot or in cars. Both mentioned a woman. I no longer knew if it was the same woman in both sentences. One of the women ran her fingers through her hair while the other watched light streaming through the landscape.
The sentences were never exactly the same, depending on whether they were read quickly or slowly. Nonetheless, they always had a reassuring slowness. Wanting to write in our own style two sentences we have just read is natural, just as wanting to imitate someone we love seems quite legitimate and even pleasing. The sentences would stretch out as though they could make grooves in the air or give the impression of a voice and a melody about to drown,one inside the other. The tense changed from one sentence to the other, I could question myself, I could worry. I always felt like starting over. Whenever a sentence skimmed the surface of the lake, characters from a faraway time would spring up, then, without much hesitation, take off into the foreign language to indulge their fiercest fantasies. Screaming was never a solution. Screaming meant a state of emergency. Life needed to be organized to avoid emergencies. Each sentence had her own
Homo sapiens
?
The city makes me dizzy with its voices surging out of insignificance and lies it absorbs me in front of the hotel the cars drop people off here and there like pawns there is always a church steeple a labyrinth of words the moving shape of a cloud an indescribable force that destroys strikes brutally while everybody tries to be themselves while I am me sitting at the Café de la Gare drinking lemonade with ice cubes because it is so good for me better even than if I had written all of this while drinking lemonade in a train-station café and had erased it.
People cry easily when tired you just need to look closely to see tears slowly forming then people turn their heads slightly as if to ward off fate I see that their nostrils their chins their foreheads are well and truly alive people act as if nothing is happening and I pretend not to seethem getting exhausted from holding back their tears then with a dry and suspicious eye they look straight ahead as if to warn about a coming disaster it’s like Tatiana’s gold watches glittering in the great glass armoire in the living room on days when this happens I no longer know if time is a light source or a misfortune and I say I must rest everywhere there are power and holes I’m right the power of stars wears me out for example when I lift my head even if it’s far it doesn’t take much before I feel the heat radiating in my hands troubling black hole this is what I see coming we can’t there are things we can’t do they happen it is frightening in my head the number of sights that make me want armoires all the more inside which I have to shut a lot of blackness all the blackness I am capable of the purest black ever seen an otherworldly black that attracts like light does by performing very quick magical somersaults something resembling happiness but in the other language this compares to nothing so I go walking alone on the mountain the happiness continues I talk to myself everything is out of focus around what I call the great happiness I must think only of ordinary things because images and words go fast like animals in the forest when they are escaping harm I get excited thinking about everything in life that flees in the name of life.
THE WATER LEVEL
…
and met her gaze looking deeply from the same waters …
Louky Bersianik
They were two sentences with water and light. I had imagined them and now I wanted to write them. The sentences were simple, they spoke of unforgettable faces and of a bridge people crossed on foot or in cars. Both mentioned a woman. I no longer knew if it was the same woman in both sentences. One of the women ran her fingers through her hair while the other watched light streaming through the landscape.
The sentences were never exactly the same, depending on whether they were read quickly or slowly. Nonetheless, they always had a reassuring slowness. Wanting to write in our own style two sentences we have just read is natural, just as wanting to imitate someone we love seems quite legitimate and even pleasing. The sentences would stretch out as though they could make grooves in the air or give the impression of a voice and a melody about to drown,one inside the other. The tense changed from one sentence to the other, I could question myself, I could worry. I always felt like starting over. Whenever a sentence skimmed the surface of the lake, characters from a faraway time would spring up, then, without much hesitation, take off into the foreign language to indulge their fiercest fantasies. Screaming was never a solution. Screaming meant a state of emergency. Life needed to be organized to avoid emergencies. Each sentence had her own
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