The rest is rust and stardust

[davidlavieri]

Be the measure, be the mystery

Guiseppe Ungaretti, “The Prayer” (1928)

[davidlavieri]

"Leave me alone," said the woman, half-asleep, but I didn't stop; clinging to her back I was trying to get in between her thighs, finally finding the parched vagina.

"If you can't, maybe you'd better go back to sleep," she said.

"In a minute," I said.

"Hurry up then," she said, and I tried to hurry up. I got hold of her wilted-guelder-rose breasts and kept jabbing her womb like a dog.

You'll be just like this, I thought. Another two or three decades, I thought. And exactly as flabby and flaccid, too. And smelling like ammo-nia, I thought; by the time I came she was wheezing asthmatically in her sleep. And then I awoke to realize I was squeezed in between her slushy womb and the damp wall, and for long minutes I didn't dare move. I didn't remember how and when I moved from the easy chairs to the bed. My head ached and the vodka was still burning my throat as if I had drunk half a bottle of sodium hydroxide. I climbed out of the bed somehow, found my clothes in the light of a match; the woman kept sleeping, her knees tucked under her stomach, like an embryo grown old. Above her hung the picture of her mother who for some reason had to watch, even in her death, the mailman, and me, and the twenty-five crippled birds.

Attila Bartís, Tranquility

[davidlavieri]

...her thoughts are occupied by the past, her activities deal with the distant future. The present is, to her, an insubstantial shadow...

Brigitte Hamman, The Reluctant Empress

[davidlavieri]

Why is the world so different from what we thought it was? Now that you're awake and see it again… has it changed at all? Now I've closed my eyes… the world I see… is so beautiful.

Yi Yi (2000)

[davidlavieri]

To be stared at, all the time, everywhere. Except to describe it as staring is already to misrepresent it, to conjure up an image of a long, fixed, open-eyed sort of look with a discernible owner, and while there are some of those, like the man who waits in the road outside your flat and stands still and solid as a rock as you pass, glaring at you with hatred in his eyes, it mostly does not feel that way. Rather, it is the glance thrown furtively, a move performed less with the whites of the eyes and more the dark of the eyelashes, so that en masse, the sensation is that of being caressed by a hundred feathered wings, or cut by a hundred tiny blades. Chira-chira is the word for it, this scattered, stolen look, the same word used for the soft twinkling of the stars, a light fall of snow, the fluttering of candlelight.

Polly Barton, Fifty Sounds

[davidlavieri]

He thinks. And then he thinks that, obviously, he can’t stop thinking. The thinking is what he is, and at the same time it’s the machine that governs him.

Jenny Erpenbeck, Go, Went, Gone

[davidlavieri]

I... should have been hurt properly. I let something genuine slip by. I was so deeply hurt. To the point of distraction. But because of that I pretended not to notice it. I didn't listen to myself. So I lost Oto. Forever. Now I see. I want to see Oto. If I do, I want to yell at her. Berate her. For lying to me all the time. I want to apologize. For not listening. For not being strong. I want her back. I want her to live. I want to talk to her just once more. I want to see her. But it's too late. There's no turning back. There's nothing I can do.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car

[davidlavieri]

The panel sets out to make a rigorous classification and distinction -- even in modes of dress -- between the social and racial castes, but it ends up by involuntarily singing the praises of the capricious and rebellious game of love, the great wrecker of all closed social hierarchies, the scatterer, the shuffler of every perfectly ordered pack of cards, that muddles up diamonds with clubs or spades so as to make the game enjoyable, or even playable.

Claudio Magris, Danube

[davidlavieri]

In this world administered and organized on a planetary scale, to be sure, the adventure and mystery of travel would seem to be dead and done for: even Baudelaire's Voyagers, who set out to look for the unheard-of and were ready to face shipwreck in the attempt, found in the unknown, and in spite of every unforeseen disaster, precisely the same same tedium that they left at home. To be on the move, however, is better than nothing: one stares out of the window of a the train as it hurtles into the countryside, one raises one's face to the breezes, and something passes, flows through the body. The air creeps into one's clothes. The ego dilates and contracts like a Portuguese man-of-war. A little ink overflows from the bottle and is diluted in an ink-colored sea.

Claudio Magris, Danube

[davidlavieri]

My recollections are not illusions. They are not the past. My memories are my present.

Daša Drndić, Trieste

[davidlavieri]

The sidewalk is white, the moon just appeared, all the bistros are closed, and my pockets are empty anyway. Farther north, I dash off toward the Chevaleret station. I'm alone in the street again. Then suddenly, two shadows appear, at least one of which has a home. The Moon is thanked for appearing. A message from distant civilizations: what is she, the Moon, alongside the poor Earth? A neighborhood near Chevaleret or a village out in the Causses, far from metropolitan France. She's so lonely, far away from her star! I too am so alone, at 12:45 a.m., on this avenue running northeast, even in one of the great cities of the world!

The Chevalaret station is also lifeless. It's the desert, the desert rebuilt in the middle of one of the biggest cities on Earth. The silent arches supporting the overhead tracks are like fossils from a vanished civilization. There aren't even any hotels around here. Wait, I see one, barely lit in blue. I'm suddenly taken by desire, it's crazy. These desires caused by hunger interrupt my thoughts like blades cutting through straw. Where's the Moon? Oh, the boulevard isn't really solid, oh, yes it is, my footsteps build it back up, and I suddenly hear the sound of the soles of my shoes on the asphalt, and the Chevaleret station, and a clean and normal train storms through the nocturnal agora. Two travelers are coming down to lose themselves in this wonderful paradise! A single flat note from a detuned flute comes from the Seine. Quick, return to the Seine and to something that resembles geography.

Jacques Besse, The Great Easter

[davidlavieri]

The pedestrians are hieratic and sane, their eyes are cold and lucid, their features hard. The motors and the little taps on brakes slowly approach music theory. I slow my pace to relax. The wills of destiny seize me like an animal. Stay in line to see what will happen.

I haven't reached Carrefour de l'Odéon yet, but I already feel all the pedestrian and automobile traffic strung together by the hint of a future lyrical creation, by the warm and metallic decision of some angel rolling about in the spheres of floors and roofs installed above us, so close to us, in multidirectional circles, like the master of an organ's keyboard whose sonorous mechanisms are the people of Paris and their machines, happily obsolete despite their elegant gears.

Jacques Besse, The Great Easter

[davidlavieri]

Judd was soon hidden by the blessed scrub. He who could squeeze the meaning out of a line by pressing on it with his finger-nail, always hastened to remove himself from the presence of true initiates when they were at their books. All the scraps of knowledge with which he was filled, all those raw hunks of life that, for choice, or by force, he had swallowed down, were reduced by the great mystery of words to the most shameful matter. Words were not the servants of life, but life, rather, was the slave of words. So the black print of other people's books became a swarm of victorious ants that carried off a man's self-respect. So he wandered through the bush on that morning, and was only soothed at last by leaves and silence.

Patrick White, Voss

[davidlavieri]

I loved Him, I loved Him the way I loved that helpless, wretched ghost of my own self I saw in my dreams, as if choking on the shame, rage, sinfulness, and melancholy of that ghost, as if overcome with shame at the sight of a wild animal dying in pain, or enraged by the selfishness of a spoilt son of my own. And perhaps most of all I loved Him with the stupid revulsion and stupid joy of knowing myself; my love for Him resembled the way I had become used to the futile insect-like movements of my hands and arms, the way I understood the thoughts which every day echoed against the walls of my mind and died away, the way I recognized the unique smell of sweat from my wretched body, my thinning hair, ugly mouth, the pink hand holding my pen: it was for this reason they had not been able to deceive me.

Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle

[davidlavieri]

Makiko was not looking at a river or a fish, but at human forms writhing on the shadowy bed. Honda elevated his head until he struck the top of the bookcase in an effort to see down through the small peephole. He could in this way observe what was taking place on the bed beyond the wall. A man's thin, pale thighs were twined about those of a woman. Immediately below him were two heaps of withered flesh hardly bursting with vigor, swaying slowly like aquatic animals as they made contact. They gleamed damply in the faint light; the devourer was unmistakably being devoured; obvious trickery was going hand in hand with sincere tremors. Two mounds of moist pubic hair touched and separated; and a white patch where the light struck the woman's belly, as if a piece of white tissue had been inserted between the two bodies, pierced Honda's awestricken eyes.

Whatever the situation, Imanishi had shamelessly exposed the pitiful thighs of an intellectual in heat. True to his theories, the cheerless, rippling oscillation of his flat buttocks, between which appeared a wasted coccyx, was merely a illusion. His obvious lack of sincerity angered Honda.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

[davidlavieri]

For the first time somewhere within-and at his age!-a desire for transformation had awakened. Having earnestly observed other men's reincarnation without so much as turning an eye, he had never brooded over the impossibility of his own. And now that he was reaching an age when the last glow of life revealed the expanse of his past, the certainty of its impossibility heightened the illusion of the possibility of rebirth all the more.

He too might do something unexpected. To this day all his actions had been predictable, and his reason had always cast its light one step ahead, like a flashlight held by someone walking along a dark road at night. By schemes and predictions he had been able to avoid surprising himself. The most frightening thing was that all mysteries, including the miracle of transmigration, finished by being cut and dried.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn

[davidlavieri]

Once at the Bang Pa In the old ladies quickly put aside their formality. Forgetting their stiff decorum, they giggled and ran about in high spirits. The formality gone, their age was all that remained of their ceremoniousness. They occupied themselves in picking at betel nuts together, quite like greedy, wrinkled parrots clustering around a bagful of seeds. They also scratched wherever they itched, thrusting their hands under the hems of their skirts. They would cackle noisily as they strutted sideways in imitation of young dancing girls. One mummied dancer with wig-like white hair shining over her brown face stretched her betel-stained mouth in gaping laughter and raised her sharp elbows, thrust sideways as she danced; the exposed, dry bones of her angular arms cut sharp shadow-pictures against the background of blue sky with its layers of dazzling clouds.

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of Dawn