The Nature of Things

Francis Ponge

Le Parti Pris des Choses

Translated and with an introduction by Lee Fahnestock

",

f:. ,;. Red Dust • New York

Originally published as Le parti des chases by Editions Gallimard Paris, 1942

copyright © Editions GaIIimard 1942

this translation and introduction are by Lee Fahnestock copyright © this translation and introduction Lee Fahnestock 1995

ISBN 0-87376-080-8

Published by Red Dust, Inc. All rights reserved

...

..,

)

To the memory of Francis Ponge 1899-1988

CONTENTS

Introduction Rain

The End of Autumn Poor Fishermen FemRum

Ripe Blackberries The Crate

The Candle

The Cigarette The Orange

The Oyster

The Pleasures of a Door

Trees Coming Undone Within a Sphere of Fog Bread

Fire

The Cycle of Seasons The Mollusk

Snails

The Butterfly

7 13 14 15 15 15 16 16 17 17 18 19 19 20 20 20 21 22 25

5

Moss 25
SeaShores 26
Water 28
The Cut of Meat 30
The Gymnast 30
The Young Mother 3 30
RC. Seine No. 31
Le Restaurant Lemeunier 33
Notes for a Sea Shell 35
Three Shops 37
Fauna and Flora 38
The Shrimp 42
Vegetation 44
The Pebble 46 6

INTRODUCTION

... ce livre au fond n' a ete lu .

. . . never has the book been fully fathomed.

Francis Ponge: "Bords de mer" I "Sea Shores"

When, in May of 1942, Occupied Paris saw the publication of Le parti pris des chases (Taking the Side of Things), Francis Ponge, living in the free zone to the south with his wife and young daughter, had been completely out of touch with the manuscript since the outbreak of war more than two years earlier. He was unaware, even, of the book's exact contents as compiled by his editor at Gallimard, the eminent Jean Paulhan. Preceded by only a handful of journal publications and one brief chapbook released fifteen years earlier, the cherished little gray volume, assembled at last, gave its forty-three-year-old author immense and unexpected pride.

While initial public reception was limited, Le parii pris attracted the notice of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, both of whom wrote important critical pieces about it. Major public and critical

7

acclaim was not to come for another twenty years, yet this early volume has since become the accepted keystone of Ponge's extensive publications, praised and claimed by successive schools of French criticism.

The son of a bank official, Ponge was born in Montpellier in 1899, and raised principally in the Protestant stronghold of Nimes and later in Avignon-both, cities steeped in Roman culture. A move to Caen in his lycee years added a more rigorous Norman influence and strong training in. philosophy, which he continued to study at the Sorbonne. Confronted by a recurring inability to speak in public, however, he abandoned advanced studies. He subsisted precariously in Paris during the twenties, quickly defecting from the Surrealist ranks and, too much the anarchist to adhere to the Anarchists, he stayed clear of all but a few other writers.

By 1925, despairing of an ability to write anything at all, Ponge found refuge in a contemplation of things. Observing that objects had passed virtually unnoticed in literature, at least since Lucretius, he proposed with deference to do a sort of De rerum natura. With the field wide open and unexplored, he would write his own Nature of Things, would study objects minutely through the senses, through emotions and the intellect, to construct a new form of definition-description. But it didn't come easily: two and three years for many of the poems, and after late-night struggles with words, how often he must have come away feeling that much of the catch had slipped between his fingers.

Yet the brief form developed in the half hour a day left to him between job and sleep shaped many of the poems for which the collection is still best known-"The Oyster," "The Butterfly," "Ripe Blackberries," and others. They are marked by the wit and beauty of the poet's precise observations, which all but conceal the poetic transformations at work just below the surface. For, drawing on the creative ambiguity of language, he was able to say several things on several levels at once, while unobtrusively demonstrating the particular nature of words and things. Over and over, an object and singular trait rise together, gathering complexity as they follow a short narrative cyc1e-a definition-description in

, metaphor-to fuse with the poem on the page, where all the elements close on the same dying note. For a sort of sacrificial death ends each of these parables: though frequently held at bay by the

8

ulsing regeneration of nature, the machinery still runs down, the Ph' dis

poem concludes, even umaruty appears.

Among these early poems, there are few if any themes or approaches of Ponge's later writing not already intimated. The longer pieces-"Notes for a Sea Shell," "The Pebble," or even "Sea Shores" -look beyond objects in isolation, to place them within a universal scheme of ancient lore, biological theory, or upheavals of the poet's own mythic cosmogony. Open works, for instance "Fauna and Flora," show a tentative willingness to expose unfinished thoughts, a trend that would eventually offer the search itself, the process of developing thought, in place of a poem that failed to materialize.

While many of these poems already state their own poetics, the principles of their creation, other theoretical essays, withheld from this volume by Paulhan, were soon published separately and later reprinted as Methodes in the large collective volumes published by Gallimard in the 60s.

In surprising contrast, two long satires selected by the editor for inclusion in Le parti pris reflect back to the protest pieces written in Ponge's period of social activism, with the difference that NR.C. Seine No." and "Le Restaurant Lemeunier," were based on actual experience and familiar scenes.

The strong pictorial aspect of the book as a whole quickly endeared the author to artists, whose vision he assimilated through sensitive analogy into his own poetic vocabulary. Their requests for his interpretations of thetr work would lead to many essays later reprinted in the Gallimard collections.

Across a wide divergence of subject and treatment, there is a unity of theme and images. Foremost is Ponge's constant evocation of the essential significance of language, the true secretion of humans. And, agnostic though he was, the precepts of a Huguenot heritage resonate through his poetry, in almost Biblical cadences, in allusions or in open declaration of mankind's innate properties-morality and humanism. Among his favorite contrasts, the poet often returns to the formless and the formed; to flora, the rooted ones, and fauna, the footloose vagabonds of every breed; to scale and disproportion; to the monotony and diversity of nature, often graced with an aura of sanctity or, in the next breath,

with sexual procreative undertones. .

Some of the lines resist comprehension, as in rare poems

9

.'

"

where a trace of personal context is allowed to remain unexplained among the more usually generalized objects (for example in "Poor Fishermen"), or else in poems of accretion, where blurred outlines from superimposed views-another leaf, another pagedo not exactly coincide. But each new layer, for word or image, adds to the epaisseur, the depth and complexity, the multiplicity

I that the poet cherished.

Things, the title says, but true to the wordplay used throughout, Le parti pris des choses translates as taking the side of or taking a resolute stand for things, as well as the side taken by things, for in

'Y Ponge's view the objects speak for themselves. Yet how quickly it becomes clear that humanity is never absent from the page. In the first place, anthropomorphism is rampant, as Ponge grants unexpected human qualities to his protean creatures, not only qualities but passions too: trees are frantic to articulate, the oyster is steadfastly closed in upon itself. What is more, imprints of the searching mind and writing hand appear in the narration, either in suggestion, or in the first person singular, when Francis Ponge steps forward, watching the rain or holding a shell in his hand. Gradually,

i more and more autobiography filters through the objects themselves in recognizable traits-the ordeals of articulation, the outbursts of rage and attempts to say something new, the waiting to be ~eard countered by fear of being laid bare to scrutiny, the

I patience and self-knowledge of the solitary snail-who is perhaps the ~blematic creature here, stubbornly tracing his silvery wake, dedicated to the intricate construction of his shell, his artwork. Ponge's fondness for the gastropod is obvious in the humor of his portrait: who else has thought to canonize a snail?

When one is translating Ponge,there is much to envy in the

• ease of personification that flows from the gender of objects in French-the masculine snail, the feminines of nature, of the sea. But we can be thankful for shared Latin roots which permit much of the wordplay to carry over, if imperfectly and with some adjustments. There are times, though, when it is best to play the poet's own game, to accommodate what he is doing rather than what he is. literallr ~aying, by reaching for words in English that duplicate his associations based on sound, on puns, rather than retaining the exact wording of the original.

In the struggle to bring across his complex thought and the registers of language ranging from poetic to colloquial, an element that tends to suffer is the rhythm everywhere present in Ponge's

10

Lee Fahnestock

writing. The aim in this complete translation of Le parti pris has b n to maintain the pleasures of those cadences. Some changes in /: forms have also been made, though not without precedent ~n ce he continued to write in both prose and verse and, indeed,

S~ted that most of these texts could be put to page either way. ..

s a On a last visit to the apartment of Francis and Odette Ponge the Rue Lhomond in 1988, a few months before his death, ~op?n to show that liberties I had taken with a small chapbook of his

ing d. I id .

oems had not been arbitrary, I opene to a passage ai out m

hroken lines to help an unfamiliar reader hear the rhythms. As

racious as ever though weak and short of breath, the poet read ~ack a page in flawless English-this exquisitely generous man who had previously denied any knowledge of the l~~age-then handed it back with a smile and an assent. Two additional poems, "Rain" and "Sea Shores," have been so treated here, in addition to

JlVegetation," which was in the earlier collection. .

For their kind and knowledgeable help at vanous stages, I would like to thank Robert W. Greene, who introduced me to the poetry and to the poet; the late Alexandre Aspel, who suggested that I begin with The Pre; Beth Archer and Serge Gavro~ky, those pioneers of Ponge translation; Norman MacAfee, MIguel Cervantes-Cervantes, Sonia Gibbons, John Cosner, and Nancy Festinger for generous response to my.questions; Olivier Nora .and David Kornacker for the kind offices of Le Bureau du LIvre Francais: and Joanna Gunderson, for her initiative, her perception and enduring patience.

11

12

RAIN

In the courtyard where I watch it fall

the rain is coming down in widely varied measure.

A filmy discontinuous screen (or tracery) at the center it's an unrelenting shower

relatively slow but rather sparse

an endless light precipitation .

fractional concentration of sheer liquid meteor. Close by the walls to the right and left

heavier individualized

the drops come louder in their fall.

Nearby they seem the size of a wheat grain over there a pea elsewhere almost a marble.

On window frames and railings the rain scuds horizontally while on the undersides it clings in, rounded lozenges, Molding to the entire surface of a small tin roof

that's visible below

it trickles in a thin skim moired in eddies

from the imperceptible bumps and ripples of the metal sheet. In the adjoining gutter

it sluices along with all the application of a shallow rivulet gently

pitched

then plunges abruptly

an absolutely vertical strand rather loosely tressed straighs.to the ground where it shatters

and dashes up in glittering bead-tipped needles.

Each of its forms has its own particular pace a correspondingly particular sound.

It all exists intensely

a complicated mechanism precise as it is fortuitous

like clockwork whose mainspring is the weight of a given mass of vapor in precipitation.

The chiming of the vertical strands against the ground the gurgle of the gutters

the tiny gong tones

all proliferate and resound together in concert with no monotony with delicacy. .

13

When the main spring runs down some few wheels chum on awhile slower and slower

then the whole mechanism comes to a halt.

At that point if the sun comes out again

everything soon vanishes

the glittering apparatus evaporates. It has rained.

THE END OF AUTUMN

In the end, all autumn is reduced to a cold tisane. Dead leaves of every essence lie steeping in the rain. No fermentation, no distillation of alcohol; no compress applied to wooden limbs can take effect till spring.

The stripping, the appraisals, take place in disarray .. All doors to the study fly open and closed. Into the waste basket, into the trash! Nature's tearing up her manuscripts, demolishing her library, flailing down her last fruit in a rage.

Then abruptly she puts aside her work and rises. Instantly she seems to tower. Disheveled, her head is in a mist. Arms hanging slack, she breathes deep, savoring the chill wind, which clears her mind. The days are short, night falls swiftly, comedy is in eclipse.

Aloft amid the other heavenly bodies, earth regains its somber mien. The illuminated portion is narrower, run through with shadowed valleys. Its shoes soak up water, like a tramp's, and they slosh.

In this froggery, this salubrious amphibiguity, everything gathers strength, hopping from rock to rock and away to another meadow. Freshets well up on every side.

It's what you might call a splendid cleansing, respecting none of the conventions! Dressed as naked, drenched to the core. And it all drags on, not drying out just yet. Three months of salutary reflection in this condition; no vascular stimulation, no bathrobe, no rubdown. But earth's strong constitution withstands it all.

And so, when buds begin to sprout again, they know what they're doing and what's going on-and if they come out in the open cautiously, swollen and ruddy, it's with full knowledge of what's afoot.

14

h t' another story, dependen.t perhaps-thoug.h.with. a

But t a s rul hich will f dr .

f 1 to it--on the black e w . . serve or aWIng

different ee .

line beneath this one.

my .

POOR FISHERMEN

lin f men by the canal at Le-Grau-du-Roi, sho.rt-hand-

Two es a bin . th . d

dil h uling in the nets and a band of urc s in e IDl -

ed, stea Y a '.

dIe swarm around the baskets, taunting:

"poor fishermen!"

Here's the account given out by the lampposts:

"Half the fish lost by flipping onto the sand, three-fourths of

the crabs gone back out to sea."

FERN RUM

d th the ferns and their lovely little fernlets,

From un ernea

could this be a glimpse of Brazil?

Not construction lumber nor matchwood, but a~l manner of leaves heaped on the ground and wetted down With seasoned

rumprom this sprout stems in fitful surges, pr?digal virgins all

d d t drunken melee of palms quite out of control,

unguar e : a vas .

each one concealing two thirds of the sky.

RIPE BLACKBERRIES

On the typographic shrubbery constituted by the poem :uong a path that leads neither away from things nor toward the mind, h kind of fruit is formed from an agglomeration of spheres, eac

filled with a drop of ink.

*

15

Black, pink, and khaki clustered together, they offer the spectacle of an eccentric family at all their ages, rather than any strong temptation to pick them.

Given the disproportion of seeds to pulp, birds don't really relish them-in the end so little remains to them when they've seen it through from beak to anus.

*

But here in the course of his professional ramble, the poet picks up food for thought: "This," he says to himself, "is how success largely crowns the patient efforts of a flower that is very fragile though protected by forbidding tangles of thorn. Without too many other virtues these berries, black as their name and their drops of ink, are ripened to their perfection, which also goes for this poem."

THE CRATE

Midway between cage and cachot, or cell, the French has cageot, a simple little open-slatted crate devoted to the transport of fruit that is sure to sicken at the slightest hint of suffocation.

Devised in such a way that after use it can easily be broken down, it never serves twice. Thus its life-span is shorter even than that of the perishables it encloses.

So, at the corners of every street leading to the market, it gleams with the unassuming lustre of slivered pine. Still brand new and somewhat aghast at the awkward situation, dumped irretrievably on the public thoroughfare, this object is most appealing, on the whole-yet one whose fate doesn't warrant our overlong attention.

THE CANDLE

There are times when nightfall rekindles a remarkable plant whose glow breaks up furnished rooms into masses of shadow.

Its golden leaf holds steady to a pitch-black stalk in the dip atop a small alabaster column.

Fusty moths choose this to assail, over the distant moon which

16

th ods to mist. But instantly singed or exhausted in the

turns e wo d .

h uiver in near-frenzy bar enng on stupor.

tussle, t et~ q the candle through the flickering of light on the

Mean nne '

d dden puffs of its own smoke, encourages the reader,

book an su ass its stand and drowns in the stuff that feeds it.

then droops acr ,

THE CIGARETTE

First let's set the atmosphere, ha~y yet. dry" wispy, wit~ t~e cigarette always _placed right in the thick of It, once engaged in Its

continuous creation.

Then, the thing itself: a small torch, far more perfume~ ~an illuminating, from which, in a number of small heaps set within a chosen rhStthm, ashes work free and fall.

Finally, its sacrifice: the glowing tip, scaling off. in si~very flakes, while a tight muff formed of most recent ash enclfcles It.

THE ORANGE

As in the sponge, within the orange there's an aspiratio~ to regain full countenance after enduring the ordeal of expressl~n. But where the sponge always succeeds, the orange ,never, for .lts cells are burst, its tissues torn. While the peel alone l~ply reg.ams its original form, thanks to its elasticity, an amber fluid has spilled out, bringing pleasant fragrance and refreshment,. to be sure-but often a bitter awareness too of a premature expulsion of seed.

So must we then take sides between these two ways ~f foorly weathering oppression?-The sponge is merely muscle, fil_ling up with air, with water, dean or dirty as the case may be-:-a disgraceful exercise. The orange has better taste but is too paSSIve, and the fragrant sacrifice ... this surely overcompensates the oppressor.

But not enough is said about the orange, merely to men~on its particular way of perfuming the air and givin? pleasure to ~ts torturer. We must underscore the glorious colonng of the fluid that

17

comes from it and which, more than the juice of the lemon, makes the larynx open wide to pronounce the word and to swallow the liquid, without the slightest apprehensive puckering at the tip of the tongue, or bristling of taste buds.

Ultimately, we are left speechless in due admiration for the envelope of the tender, fragile, oval pink ball in its thick damp blotter, whose extremely thin but well-pigmented epidermis, tartly savored, is just pocked enough to attract the light fittingly to the fruit's perfect form.

But. at the end of an all too brief study, carried out as roundly as possible, we must get down to the pip. This seed, shaped like a , miniature lemon, bears on the outside the light wood color of the lemon tree, on the inside the green of a pea or a delicate sprout. And there within it-after the sensational exploding Chinese lantern of flavors, colors, and fragrances that constitute the fruited ball itself-is where the relative firmness and the green (not entirely insipid,incidentally) of the wood, the branch, and the leaf are found: small, when you come right down to it, yet surely the fruit's raison d'etre.

THE OYSTER

Roughly the size of a rather large pebble, the oyster is more gn~r.led i~ appearance, less uniform in color, and brilliantly whitish. It IS a world categorically closed in upon itself. And yet it c~n be opened: that takes gripping it in a folded rag, plying a rucked and dull-edged knife, chipping away at it over and over. Probing fingers get cut on it, nails get broken. It's a rough job. The pounding you give it scars the envelope with white rings, a sort of halo.

Within, one finds a world of possibilities for food and drink: beneath a mother-of-pearl firmament (strictly speaking), the skies above settle in on the skies below, leaving only a rockpool, a viscous greenish sack that ebbs and flows before the eyes and nose, fringed with a border of darkish lace.

On rare occasion the perfect formula pearls up in its nacreous throat, and we take it at once for our adornment.

18

THE PLEASURES OF A DOOR

. s never touch a door.

~g. unknown to them: pushing open whether rudely or

It IS a JOY . .. b ck .

f those great familiar panels, turning to put It a m

kindly one 0

hiding a door in one's embrace. place- a

... The joy of grasping one of those. tall barrier~ to ahi~ohom ~thY

lai knob in its middle' the quick contact in we, W1 the porcde amt. n briefly arrest~d the eye opens wide, and the

forwar rna 10 . . ' .

whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.

With a friendly hand it is stayed a moment 10n~~r before giv-

. it decided shove and closing oneself in, a condition pleasant-

mg I a II i1 d I k . rin g

ly confirmed by the click of the strong but we -0 e .. oc sp .

"

TREES COMING UNDONE WITHIN A SPHERE OF FOG

Within a fog that enfolds the trees, their leaves are spi~ted away. They-those leaves-already taken aback by slow oxidation and mortified by the withdrawal of sap for the greater g~od of flower and fruit, had loosened their ties since the sweltenng

heat of August.

Vertical channels open within the bark, and thro~gh the~

moisture is drawn down to the ground, drawn to lose mterest m

vital portions of the trunk. .

The flowers are scattered, the fruit is dropped. From .a tender

age, the relinquishing of their living attributes and bodily parts has been a familiar exercise for trees.

19

BREAD

The crust on a loaf of French bread is a marvel, first off, because of the almost panoramic impression it gives, as though one had the Alps, the Taurus range, or even the Andean Cordillera right in the palm of the hand.

In that light, an amorphous belching mass was slipped into the stellar oven on our behalf, and there while hardening, it molded into valleys, ridges, foothills, rifts ... And from then on, all those clearly articulated planes, all the wafer-thin slabs where light takes care to bank its rays-without a thought for the disgraceful mush beneath the surface.

That cold soggy substratum, the doughy innards, consists of a sponge-like tissue; there flowers, leaves are fused together at every bend like Siamese twins. When the bread grows stale, the flowers wither and shrink: they come apart from one another and the whole thing goes to crumbs.

But let's cut short here. For bread should be mouthed less as an object of respect than of consumption.

FIRE

Fire works an established sequence: to begin with, all flames make off in one direction ...

(Fire's gait can only be compared to that of animals: it has to leave one spot to occupy another; it moves like both an amoeba and a giraffe, lunging forward with the neck, trailing along with the feet) ...

Then, even as the masses of systematically tainted material crumble, the escaping gas progressively transforms into a single flight of butterflies.

THE CYCLE OF SEASONS

Weary of holding back all winter long, trees suddenly fancy they've been had. They can't keep it up a moment longer: they let

20

. ords a flood of them, an eruption of green. They

·th theu w , all

fly W1 mplete leafing out of words. Who cares! It'll

hieve a co· .

try to ac t it canl And as a matter of fact it does sort out. No

tasbes 1 . d

sort ou at all in foliation ... They ~g out word~ at ran om, o~

freedom . e £lin out twigs on which to hang still more words. so they believ I th!e II they think, lito take on everything." They

"0 r trunks are , h B li . th

u hid to blend in with one anot er. e evmg ey

d their best to e, . full f

o hi blanket the whole world with a range 0

ayeveryt ng, d ., th

can s I lit ees II Incapable of even eta1010g e

d they say on yr. .

",:or s~hich take off again, just as they are rejoicing at having pro-

brrdsd such odd flowers. Ever the same leaf, ever the s~e wa'! of duce . limits forever identical leaves hung identical-

f lding the same r thin I Ul .

un 0 , . leafl-Same thing! Yet another! Same g. ti-

l I Try one more . . b '.

y. thi ould ever stop them but this sudden 0 servation.

~;~~;:;,:ono~~t~ing away from trees by wayllof trees';l A ne~

. ss another change of mood. "Let it a turn ye ow an

weaTlne r.. din AUTUMN II

fall. Comes the time of silence, the denud g, .

THE MOLLVSK

Th mollusk is a being-almost a ---ifuality. It has no need for a

e thin lik' t i a tube

framework but only a rampart, some g e p~ 10 .

Here nature forgoes a display of protoplasm ill g~od form. ~ et it demonstrates its affection by painstakingly sh~lteTlng the thing

in a iewel case whose inner face is the more beau~. .

~o it is not merely a glob of spit, but a most precIOUS reality. 1£ The mollusk is endowed with powerful energy to close itse in. To tell the truth, it is simply a muscle, a hinge, a door latch and

its door. . hIve doors A latch that secreted the door. Two shg t y conca

constitute its entire abode.

First and last abode. It resides there till after its death.

There's no way to get it out alive. d

Every last cell in a human bo~y clings in the same way, ~

with the same vigor, to words-reClprocally. . 1 thi

along and VlO ates s

But at times some other creature comes .

sepulchre, when it's well made, and settles there in place of its late

builder.

Take the hermit crab, for instance.

21

SNAILS

. Unlike the gastronome, that dry-land breed which also follow Its stomach, these Gastropoda-snails-are fond of humid earth. G on, they advance at full length, adhering to it all the way. They lug some along, they eat some, excrete some. They traverse it. It traverses them. This is interpenetration in the best of taste, tone on tone you might say-with one passive element, one active, the passive nourishing as it bathes the active, which moves from place to place while eating.

(There is more to be said about snails. To begin with, their natural humidity. Their sang froid. Their extensibility.)

What's more, it should be observed that a snail outside his shell and not in motion is inconceivable. Once resting, they immediately turn in upon themselves. And conversely, the moment a s~ail re~eals it~ nudity, presenting a vulnerable form, modesty dictates immediate motion. Exposed, they're underway.

During dry periods snails withdraw to ditches, where the presence of their bodies actually seems to help maintain humidity. No doubt they associate closely with other varieties of cold-blooded animals there-toads and frogs. But on re-emerging they can't keep pace. Greater credit attaches to their going in because of greater pains in getting out.

It should be noted, incidentally, that if they are fond of humid soil that's not to say they have any great affection for areas where the ~roportions tip in water's favor, as in marshes or ponds. And certainly they prefer terra firma, providing it is rich and moist.

They have a predilection too for plants with green and waterlo~ged leav~s. They know how to live off them, leaving only the veins, carvmg up the tenderest parts. They are bar none the scourge of salad greens.

What are they like down in ditches? Creatures that seek out those depths for some of their better qualities, but fully intending to leave them. They are a constitutive but transitory element of s.uch places. And there, just as much as in the bright daylight of firm paths, their shell maintains their proud reserve.

Surely it must sometimes be a nuisance carrying the shell about everywhere they go, but they don't complain and in the ~ong run they are very pleased to have it along. It's a precious ability, wherever you may be, to retreat behind your own closed doors and foil intruders-well worth the extra effort.

22

I ver with pride over this capacity, this convenience.

They s.: be that I am such a sensitive vulnerable creature and "Bow c::\~ered from the assaults of interlopers, so much in posyet ~o S ~ happiness and tranquility?" Whence the marvelous seSSIon 0

in of the head. . .

bearllS~ attached to the soil, so touching and slow, so pros:essive

d ca able of detaching myself from the ground to ~ inward an p lf and devil-take-the-rest-of-you, and yet a kick can roll upon myse . f .. . firm' me wherever it pleases. I'm completely sure a . regammg a .

. eattaching myself to the ground wherever chance has

footmg, r il h . al

landed me and finding my fodder there: so , t e most umvers

sustenance./I _ . .

So what a joy, what great good fortune to be a snail. But W1~h

this slaver of arrogance they leave a mark on all they touch. A silvery wake trails after them. And shows them up, perhaps, to the winged creatures that crave them. Aye, there's the rub, that is the question, to be or not to be (for the proud), ~e dange:. .

Solitary, clearly the snail is rather sohtary. Hls. friends are few. But his wen-being does not require them. He clings so well to nature, comes so rapturously dose to it, so perfectly: lover of the soil, embracing it with his whole body, and o~ the.leaves, and the sky to which he so proudly raises his head, with hIS ultra-s.en-, sitive eyeballs; nobility, languor, wisdom, arrogance, vanity,

pride. .

. Let's not suggest that in this a snail resembles th.e pIg. No,. he

does not have those mean little hooves, that anXlOUS trottmg about. That need, that shameful headlong flight. 'Greater resistance, greater stoicism. More methodical, .more ~tately and surely less gluttonous, less capricious-droppmg this morsel only to pounce on another-less hysterically hasty in gluttony, less fearful

of letting something get away. . . . .,

Nothing is so handsome as this forward m~b.on, this snails pace, so slow, so sure, so discreet, such costly stnvmg for the p~rfeet glide with which they honor the earth! ~o ~e a ~en~y s~P with a silvery wake. This manner of proceeding IS ~~Jestic, particularly if bearing in mind once again the vulnerability, the ultrasensitive eyeballs.

Is anger perceptible in snails? Are there known examples of this? Betrayed by no outward gesture, it must show up only as a more flocculent, more rapid secretion. The slaver of arrogance. Here it is clear that their expression of anger is the same as that of

23

pride. Thus they reassure themselves and impress it on the in a richer, more silvery mode.

The expression of their anger, as of their pride, begins to

ten as it dries. But it also marks their traces and shows them up their raptors (their predators). By the same token it is not lasting beyond the next rain.

And the same is true for all who express themselves in an entirely subjective way without second thoughts, and sketched in lightly at that, with no regard for shaping and building up their expression as a sound construction with several dimensions. More durable than themselves.

Snails seem to feel no such need. They are more like heroescreatures whose very existence is a work of art-than artists in. the sense of makers of artworks.

But here I reach one of the principal points of their lesson, which is actually not peculiar to them but held in common with all shelled creatures: the shell, part and parcel of their being, is at the same time a work of art, a monument. It outlasts them by far.

And this is the example they give us. Saints, they make their lives into works of art, an artwork of their own perfection. Their very secretion is produced in such a way that it assumes form. Nothing outside themselves, outside their necessity or need, is their work. Then again, nothing disproportionate to their physical being. Nothing but what is necessary to them, obligatory.

In this, they trace man's duty for him. Great thoughts come from the heart. Perfect yourself morally, and you shall create beautiful poetry. Morality and rhetoric meet in the aspirations and desires of the wise.

But saints in what way? Specifically, in strict obedience to their nature. So first know yourself, Accept yourself as you are. In keeping with your vices. In proportion to your stature.

But what is the essence of man? Language and morality.

Humanism.

Paris, March 21,1936.

24

THE BUTTERFLY

ar concocted in the stems wells up deep inside flow-

~~~ . th

ly washed cups a gre.at struggle take place on e

in poor '. .

ers, asd .. ' from which, a sudden volley ofbutte~flies.

groun . each caterpillar head was left bhnded and black-

But sroce . I I' hi h t

h torso emaciated, by the ventab e exp OSlOn w c sen

ened,.eac .'

. up symmetncal wmgs, .'

£lar~e erratic butterfly alights simply at the whim of Its haphaz-

ard flight, or 50 it seems. . . . .' .

Volatile matchstick, its flame IS non-contaglOus. And In any

. .: g too late it can only note the full-blown flowers. No

event amvln .' .' . . . h I

. 1 ym' g the lamplighter, it venfies the oil supply ill eac . t

matter. p a . ft th .

t flowers the atrophied tatters it fernes aloft, us avengmg

res son '. . h f fth

a long amorphOUS humiliation as caterpIllar at t e oot 0 e

stems. . . the wi d

Miniature sailboat of the skies, lll-treated by e wm s as a

petal superfluity, footloose, it goes breezing about the garden.

MOSS

In days of yore, the roving scouts of vegetation c~e upon an arresting heap of rock. Whereupon thousands of Silken velvet

sprigs settled down cross-legged.. . .

Ever since, with the evident clenching of the moss and Its

retainers to the bare rock, everything, caught up in an inextricable tangle and bound in beneath, panics, thrashe~, suffoc~tes. .

What's more, hairs have sprouted; WIth passmg time the

whole thing has darkened even more. .

Dh furry preoccupations growing longer and l~nger! Thl~k

rugs, bending in prayer when we sit upon th:m' spnng up agam these days with uncertain aspirations. And this leads not alone to

suffocations but also drownings.

Then simply scalping the sturdy, austere old r.ock of these

terry cloth terrains, these doormats damp to saturation, becomes

quite possible.

25

SEASHORES

Almost to its farthest reaches

the sea is a simple thing reiterant wave upon wave. But in nature

the simplest things cannot be broached without formalities with-

out bowing and scraping

the most complex things without some paring down. This and also

by reason of resentment against their overwhelming immensity is why man rushes headlong for the outer limits

or intersections of vast things

in order to define them.

For reason caught in the web of uniformity wavers precariously and grows evasive:

a mind in search of ideas

should first lay in a store of images.

The air even when roiled by fluctuating temperatures

or its tragic craving for influence and personal inquiry into every

last thing

still fails to riffle the pages and more than superficially wear away the voluminous marine tome

whereas the other more stable element

able to support us

thrusts into the waters obliquely and right to the rocky hilt broad

earthen blades which persist in that dense medium.

At times on coming up against an energetic mass of muscle a blade reemerges bit by bi.t:

it is what we call a beach.

This portion of the expanse

alien to the free air yet repelled by the deep though to some degree familiar with it stretches out between the two

rather unkempt and barren

and generally sustaining no more than a trove of debris endlessly polished and amassed by the devastating force. An elemental concert

all the more delightful for its restraint and reflective bent has been playing there through all eternity for no one.

26

. . f ....... ation through the spirit of persistence

S]J1ce its OUA' fr . h ki

which blowS now and then oz:n t . e s es

d t pan a boundless platitude an ac SU

a wave .

rolling in from afar urumpeded and unreproached

finally for the first time comes upon someone to speak to.

But one quick word alone

is confided to the pebbles and the shells which seem quite stirred by it

and in uttering it the wave expires

as each one still to come will expire on uttering the same speaking up from time to time in slightly rougher weather.

Tumbling one on top of the other each ;"ave on reaching the orchestra lightly raises its collar doffs its hat

and gives its name at the place where it's directed.

Thus thousands of homonymic lordlings on a single day are presented by the prolix prolific sea in labial offering to each of its shores.

Presented to your forum as well oh pebbles but this is not the fabled harangue by some untutored Danube peasant coming to be heard. Instead it is the mighty Danube itself

mingled with all the other rivers of the world their flow and their pretensions spent

and each separately plunged in a rude awakening that's bitter but to the palate of one who might be primed

to absorb and appreciate its most secret quality

the flavor.

Indeed it is after the anarchy of these rivers

upon their release into the deep and copiously inhabited

commons of liquid matter that the name of sea is given.

This is why to her own shores the sea will always seem absent: taking advantage of the reciprocal remoteness

which prevents their intercommunication save through herself or by vast detours

the sea probably lets each shore believe she flows that way specifically.

27

In fact polite with all even more than polite:

capable of all raging transports towards each one of them every conviction in turn

the sea harbors in the deeps of her permanent abyss an infinite reserve of currents.

She never but slightly overruns her bounds reins in on her own the fury of her billows

and like the medusa dispensed to fishermen as a miniature or token of herself

merely drops an ecstatic curtsey on her every shore.

And so it is for Neptune's ancient garment

the pseudo-organic accumulation of veils strewn evenly across three quarters of the globe. Neither by the blind dagger of rocks

nor the most deeply trenching storm

that riffles through sheaves of pages at a time

nor even by the advertent eye of man intently engaged though actually beyond all control

in a medium denied to the unstoppered orifice of the other senses and which a hand plunged in for grasping disturbs still morenever has the book been fully fathomed.

WATER

Below me, forever below me, there's water .. Gazing at it, I'm always looking down. Like the ground, like some portion of the ground, a modification of ground.

Water is colorless and glistening, formless and cool, passive and determined in its single vice: gravity. With exceptional means at its disposal to gratify the vice: circumvention, perforation, infiltration, erosion.

The vice plays an inner role as well: water endlessly ravels in upon itself, constantly refuses to assume any form, tends only to self-humiliation, prostrating itself, all but a corpse, like the monks of some orders. Forever lower: that seems to be its motto-the very opposite of excelsior.

*

28

. ht almost say that water is insane, given this obses-

You mig . al d t bev it ity al

. thi fixation the hystenc . nee 0 0 ey IS gravI· one.

Sian s ' '. h kn h d

' b sure, every last thing on eart, ows t e same nee ,

hi~ t:U times and everywhere must be satisfied. This standing w dr ~e for instance, is obstinate in its desire to be firmly planted warh 0 o'und and if one day it should be in precarious balance, it

on t e gr ,

ld sooner topple than take countermeasures. Yet to some

exte t it does play with gravity, defies it: it doesn't collapse thr en h and through-its cornice, its moldings, don't lend them-

aug '. h d f i . di

selves to that. Some inner resistance persists, to t e goo a Its m -

viduality and form.

By definition, LIQUID is what seeks to obe~ gravity rather than maintain its form, forgoes all form to obey Its graVIty. And loses ali bearing because of this fixation, these unhealthy qualms. Because of this vice, which makes water rapid, headlong or stagnant, formless or savage, formless and savage, savagely burrowing, for instance, crafty, infiltrating, circumventing-to the point where you can do as you will with it, run water through pipes to make it gush up vertically, so as to enjoy the way it eventually comes plashing, raining down: truly a slave.

... Yet the sun and moon are jealous of this exclusive influence, they try to exert pressure on water whenever it leaves itself open to the risk of vast expanses and particularly in a state of least resistance, dispersed in shallow puddles. At those times the sun exacts a greater tribute. It forces water into a perpetual cycle, treating it like a caged squirrel on its wheel.

*

Water escapes me ... '. slips through my fingers. And that's not the worst of it! Things aren't even as neat and clean as that (as a lizard or a frog): I'm left with traces on my hands, blotches that take awhile to dry or have to be wiped off. It eludes and yet marks me, without my being able to do a whole lot about it.

Ideologically it's the same thing: water eludes me, eludes all definition, yet leaves its traces in my mind, on this paper-formless blots.

*

Water's anxiety: sensitive to the slightest change of incline.

Leaping downstairs two steps at a time. Playful, childishly obedient, returning the moment we call it back by tilting the slope this way.

29

THE CUT OF MEAT

Every cut of meat is a sort of factory, blood mills and presses. Tubing, blast furnaces, vats, consort with trip hammers, grease tubs.

Steam gushes out, seething. Dark flames, bright flames, glow-

erred.

Bared to the skies, cinders sluice down on runnels of gall. And all of it cools slowly into nightfall, into death.

At once, if not rust then some other chemical reaction sets in, exuding noxious odors.

THE GYMNAST

The very image of his G, the gymnast sports a goatee and handlebars that all but meet a heavy lovelock curling low across his forehead.

A fine figure in his skin-tight suit which creases twice at the groin, he emulates his Y, with the stroke of its tail to the left.

He sets hearts a-fluttering, prizes his chastity, utters no oath beyond BASTAl

Rosier than nature, less agile than an ape, he lunges at the apparatus, driven by sheer zeal. Then, head held fast in the knotted rigging, he interrogates the air like a worm half out of its mound.

To top it off, he sometimes plummets from the rigging like a caterpillar, only to bounce back on his feet, the paragon of human idiocy bowing to your adulation.

THE YOUNG MOTHER

A few days after childbirth, the woman's beauty is transformed.

Her face, often bent over her chest, grows slightly longer. Her eyes, attentively peering down at a nearby object, occasionally look up, faintly distracted. Their gaze is filled with confidence, but seeking continuation. Her arms and hands bend together in a crescent,

30

. all sustaining. Her legs, grown thin and weakened, are gladmutu t Yd knees drawn up high. The distended belly,. livid, still

lyseae, . izh d

t der: the abdomen readjusts to rest, to rug ts un er covers. very en ,

But soon up and about, the tall body maneuvers through

bt . ting hung out conveniently high and low, white squares of the hun hich from time to time are grasped by a free hand, are w~skl' wd tested knowledgeably, then folded or hung out again

Cfln e , ..

depending on the verdict.

R.C. SEINE NO.

It is up a wooden flight of stairs never waxed in ~ty years, . the dust of cigarette butts discarded at the door, amid a sorry nlatoon of unmannerly petty clerks, hat on head and briefcase in hand, that twice a day our suffocation begins.

Wan daylight reaches the dilapidated spiral, pervaded by ~ haze of suspended sawdust. To the s~U£fle of ~hoes h?ist~d weanly from one tread to the next, following the dingy aXIS, like coffee beans we edge towards the grinding blades.

Each individual believes he is acting freely, because an extremely simple necessity, not unlike gravity, drives him on: from the far reaches of the sky, the hand of poverty cranks the mill.

*

To tell the truth, the exit, for the likes of us, is not all that perilous. The portal we must pass has simply one flesh a~d blood man-sized trip gate, a guard who only half way blocks It: rather than a set of gears, it is more of a sphincter. Everyone is promptly expelled, shamefully hale and hearty, though very downhearted, through intestines well lubricated with wax, with Fly-Tax, and electric light. Then, abruptly strung out at broad intervals, we f~d ourselves in the oppressive atmosphere of a long-term hospital care unit for the indigent, tearing full tilt through a sort of monastery-skating rink whose numerous tributaries intersect at right angles-where the uniform is a threadbare jacket.

*

Soon, in each department the metal cabinet doors part with a terrible screech, and files, like horribly familiar fossil-birds rousted from their roosts, lumber heavily onto the desks, where they flap

31

about. A macabre examination begins. Oh commercial illiteracy, to the clatter of the sacred typewriters, now comes the long, the everlasting, celebration of your worship, demanding that we serve.

Everything in turn is entered on duplicate printed forms, where the word reproduced in ever paler mauve might ultimately dissipate through the sheer disdain and boredom of the paper, were it not for the folders, those bastions of stout blue cardboard pierced in the center with a round peep hole so no sheet of paper inserted there can go unseen and forgotten.

Two or three times a day, in the midst of this ceremony, the varicolored mail, radiant and stupid as a tropical bird, fresh out of envelopes marked with the black kiss of the post office, comes bounding in and lands in front of me.

Each page from the outer world is taken in, then entrusted to a small domestic carrier pigeon, who guides it through its successive destinations until it is filed away.

An array of jewels plays a part in these momentary couplings: gilt corners, fasteners, paper clips wait in small receptacles to be put to use.

*

Meanwhile bit by bit, with passing time, the tide is rising in the waste baskets. When they are full to overflowing, it is noon: a strident clangor invites immediate evacuation of the premises. It's worth noting that no one needs to be told twice. A desperate stampede ensues on the stairs, where both sexes, permitted to mingle in flight as they were not for entry, collide and jostle, each for himself.

This is the moment when the heads of departments truly take cognizance of their superiority: no matter wheth.er "Turba ruii or ruuni" -whether the mob "dashes" or "dash" -they, at a measured priestly pace, permitting the rout of the monks and little novices of all orders to pass them by, make a stately tour of their domain, girded by the privilege of frosted glass, where the embalming virtues are arrogance, bad taste, and self-serving denunciation,-and upon reaching their cloak room, where it is not unusual to see gloves, a cane, or a silken scarf, they put off their habit of canonical smirks and refigure themselves as true men of the world.

32

LE RESTAURANT LEMEUNIER

Th e is nothing so moving as the spectacle in the vast Restau-

L er eunier on the Rue de la Chausse d' Antin, provided by

rant em ,

h . d s of clerks and saleswomen who lunch there every day.

the ore . d with diali th tuff f

. ht light and music are dispense WIt pro g ty, e s a

Brig Beveled mirrors and gilt on all sides. Through a thicket of dreamS. k id alr d lin d

een plants, you enter by w~y of a darer ~orn or- .... e~ y e

gr'th a few diners squeezed m around their tables-which opens :'to a room of gigantic ~roportions. with several wooden balconies forming a figure eight on a smgle lev.el, where you are drawn in by clouds of warm odors, by the clink of ~utlery and china, the cries of the waitresses and buzz of conv~rs~tion.. .

It's a vast composition worthy of Veronese m Its aspirations and great size, yet it would have to be painted entirely in the style

of Manet's well-known Bar. ..

Unquestionably the princip~l character~ are, f~st of all, the group of musicians at th~ cross~ng. of the.flgu~e elght~ the~ the cashiers perched high behind their tillS,th~lI white an~.mvan~bly swelling blouses much in evidence, and finally the PItiful cancatures of head waiters moving about quite slowly though sometimes obliged to get involved,with the same haste as the waitresses not because the diners are impatient (little accustomed as they are to making demands) but rather from a feverish professional zeal spurred on by the sense of insecurity within the current state of supply and demand on the job market.

Oh world of platitude and prattle, here you reach perfection!

Here each day a vast and heedless generation of youth ape~ the raucous frivolity that the bourgeoisie affords itself a few times yearly, when the banker father or kleptomaniac mother recei~e some truly unexpected windfall and duly wish to impress their colleagues.

Elaborately decked out, as their parents ~ the co~try would only be on Sundays, the young clerks and their la~y frien~ wade in each day with glee and ritual obligation. Each clings to his plate like a hermit crab to its shell, while the billowing flow of some Viennese waltz, whose strains rise above the chink of china shells, stirs heart and stomach.

As in a magic grotto, I see them all talking and laughing but do

33

not hear them. Young salesman, it is here, amidst a horde of your fellows, that you must speak to the lady at your side and reveal your very heart. Oh secret, it is here you shall be exchanged!

Creamy, many-layered desserts, boldly erected and served up in footed goblets of some dubious metal, hastily washed and unfortunately always tepid, allow those diners who select them to display more clearly than by any other token the depth of feeling that inspires them. For one, it is the enthusiasm incited by the presence at his side of a magnificently be-waved stenographer for whom he would not hesitate to commit a thousand similar costly follies; for another it is the wish to display a tasteful frugality (earlier he had eaten no more than a light hers-d'oeuvre) combined with an attractive taste for delicacies; for some it is the way to show an aristocratic disdain for anything in the world not graced with a slight hint of magic; finally others, through the manner in which they savour it, reveal a lofty and sophisticated soul, a confirmed habit and surfeit of luxury.

Meantime quantities of crumbs and large pink blotches have accumulated on the linens, scattered here and there or spread smooth.

Somewhat later, cigarette lighters take center stage, varied according to their activating mechanism or the way it is flicked. Meanwhile, raising their arms and revealing their particular badge of perspiration at the armpit, the women touch up their hair or ply their lipstick.

This is the moment when, in a rising hubbub of scraping chairs, snapping napkins and squashed bread crumbs, the final rite of the curious ceremony is played out. The waitresses move in on each of their clients in turn, belly first, so fetchingly waisted in by their apron-ties, and with notebook in pocket and pencil stub in hair, work out rapid calculations by memory. Then it is that vanity is punished and modesty rewarded. Coins and bills are exchanged on the table, as though everyone were cashing in his chips.

Yet, at the instigation of the women working the floor during the last courses of the evening meal, a gradual removal of furniture breaks out, later to wind up behind closed doors, so the damp task of cleaning can be started immediately and completed unencumbered.

It is only then that one by one the women employees, fingering the few coins jingling deep in their pockets, with resurgent thought in their hearts of a child being cared for in the country or

34

t hed at some neighbor's, apathetically take their leave of the ;a:~ened premises, while from the opposite sidewalk where the men wait for them, nothing can be seen but a vast menagerie of tables and chairs, at the ready, stacked one on top of the other, contemplating the deserted street vacantly, fervently.

NOTES FOR A SEA SHELL

A sea shell is a little thing, but by putting it back where I found it lying on a broad stretch of sand, I can blow it out of all proporti<Jn. For I'll take up a handful of.sand and observe w~at little is left in my palm after most has slipped through my fingers, I'll study a few grains then each one individually, and at that point no single grain of sand will seem a little thing. And soon the shell in question, the oyster or periwinkle or razor clam, will pass for an. enormous monument, colossal yet delicate, not unlike the temple of Angkor Wat, the church of Saint-Maclou, or the Pyramids, but with much stranger significance than those all too incontestable manmade objects.

If it should then cross my mind that this shell, which can surely be swept under again by a wave, is inhabited by a creature, if I add a living creature to the shell, picturing it back beneath a few centimeters of water, you can easily understand how my awe will augment, how different it becomes from any impression produced by even the most remarkable of the monuments just mentioned!

*

Man's monuments are like pieces of his skeleton, or any other skeleton, like huge scraggy bones: they call to mind no inhabitant of similar dimensions. The most enormous cathedrals merely spew out a shapeless throng of ants, and even the most magnificent house or mansion built for a single man still resembles a multi-celled beehive or ant hill more than a sea shell. When the master leaves his manor, he certainly cuts less of a figure than the hermit crab offering a glimpse of his monstrous claw at the mouth of the superb coil that shelters him.

I may amuse myself imagining Rome, or Nimes, as a dismembered skeleton-here the tibia, there the skull of some ancient living city, some bygone human. But then I have to conjure up an

35

enormous colossus in flesh and blood, who would really not correspond to anything reasonably inferable from what was taught at school, even with the aid of expressions in the singular, such as

the Roman Populace or the Tartar Horde. . .

How I wish somebody someday could give me an inklmg that such a colossus did really once exist, could son:eh~w n~r:me ~~ highly fantastic, singularly abstract and unconvincing ,:sl0n of It. If I could only touch his cheek, know the contours of his arm and

the way he held it by his side, .

With the shell we have all of that: we have it before us m flesh and blood, we are not taking leave of nature: the mollusk and crustacean are right here with us. Whence a sort of anxiety that increases our pleasure tenfold.

*

Instead of those gigantic monuments which testify only to the grotesque disparity between his imagination and his person (or his disgraceful social and convivial habits), or again instead of those statues on his own scale or slightly larger (here I'm thinking of Michelangelo's David), which are simply representations of himself . . . instead of all that, for some unknown reason I wish that man carved out a sort of niche or shell to his own measure, an object very different from the mollusk form yet similarly proportioned (native African huts are quite satisfying in that respect): I wish that man applied himself through the ages to creating a shelter not much larger than his body, one involving all his imagination and reasoning; that he put his genius to work on appropriate scale rather than disproportion-or at very least that his genius recognized the contours of the body that sustains it.

And 1 do not even admire those who, like the Pharaohs, have monuments to a single man erected by a multitude. I would sooner he had put that multitude to work on something no larger, or not much larger, than his own body or-which would have been even more commendable-that he had shown himself superior to other men through the quality of his own work.

In that light I particularly admire certain restrained writers or composers: Bach, Rameau, Malherbe, Horace, Mallarme=-ebove all the writers, because their monument is made from the true secretion cornmon to the human mollusk, from the thing most closely proportioned and adapted to his body, yet bearing the least conceivable likeness to his form: I mean LANGUAGE.

36

Oh Louvre of the written word, which may perh aft

d . f this b inh bi db aps er the

erruse 0 race e a Ite yother proprietors_ k

f . t bi d " man eys,

or ins ance, or ir s, some s,,:penor be~g-just as the crustacean

takes the place of the mollusk ill the penwinkle shell.

And then, when the whole animal kingdom is at an d .

d d i , en ,all'

err: s~n "'. minute grams seep s~owly in, while on dry land it

shll.g!lffiIDers an~ we:rrs away~ gomg about its glittering decompositron, oh stenle, immaterial dust, oh glistening remains, though endlessly churned and pulverized between the rolling mills of air and ~ea, FINALL Y! no humans are left there, nobody to form another thing from the sand, not even glass, and that's THE END!

THREE SHOPS

~ear the Place Maubert, where I wait for the bus early in the mornmg, three shops stand side by side: Jeweler, Coal and Firewood, Butcher. Looking them over one by one, I notice the different behavior, as I see it, of metal, of precious stones, of coal, firewood, and a cut of meat.

Let's not dwell on metals, which are simply the product of man's violent or divisive action on unrefined deposits or certain agglomerates which would never on their own have had such intentions, nor on precious stones, whose very rarity must be the reason why We grant them only few well-chosen words within an equitably composed discourse on nature.

~s for meat, at shudder at the mere sight of it, a kind of sympathetic horror, puts me under great constraint. When freshly cut in fact, .a veil of vapor or steam sui generis screens it even from eyes seeking proof for cynicism, strictly speaking: I will have said all I can when I've drawn one moment of attention to its gasping appearance.

. But the contemplation of wood and coal is a source of joy, as sunple as it is sober and certain, which I would be happy to share. It might well take several pages, whereas here at hand I have only a ?alf o~ one. Which is why I'll confine myself simply to offering this tOpIC for thought: 1/1st) TIME SPENT IN ONE-WAY MOTION IS ALWAYS AVENGED, THROUGH DEATH. 2nd) BROWN, BECAUSE BROWN LIES BETWEEN GREEN AND BLACK

37

ALONG THE PATH OF CARBONIZATION, THE FATE OF WOOD STILL ALLOWS-THOUGH MINIMALLY-FOR ONE ACTION, WHICH IS ERROR, BLUNDERING, AND EVERY IMAGINABLE MISUNDERSTANDING./I

FAUNA AND FLORA

Fauna move from place to place, while flora unfold before your very eyes.

One whole category of living things is directly taken in charge by the earth.

They have their own assured place in the world and, through great seniority, their honors.

Unlike their footloose brothers, they are not an addendum to the world, intruders upon the earth. They do not roam in search of a place to die, for all that the earth, as with others, meticulously absorbs their remains.

No cares to do with food or housing for them, these flora, no internecine ravening; no terrors, or mad pursuits, no cruelties, cries, laments, cross words. They make no common cause with disruptions, passions, murder.

From the moment they show above ground, they are at home wherever they may be. With never a thought for their neighbors, they don't encroach on each other in mutual-consumption. They don't issue from each other through gestation.

They die through desiccation and falling to the ground, or rather, dropping where they stand, rarely through disease. No one portion of their body is so sensitive that a wound there would bring death to the whole entity. But theirs is a sensitivity somewhat touchier as to climate, to conditions of existence.

They are not ... They are not ... Their hell is of another sort.

They have no voice. They're all but paralytic. They have no way to attract attention but by their posture. They do not seem to know the anguish of feeling unjustified. But in any case they would have no way to escape such a dread by flight, or even consider

38

escaping, in a frenzy of speed. There is no mov .

d . . ement m them

beyon extension, No gesture, no thought no desir h '

. . b hat b . ,e per aps, or no

~tenbo~ ut t at nngs a monstrous increase of their bod

UTemediable excrescence. ' y, an

Or rather, far worse, no chance monstrosity: despite all ff

t 1/ th I 1/ h. . e orts

a express, emse ves, t ey never manage anything b d

h d . . f . eyon a t ousanc repetitions 0 the same expression, the sam 1 f In

. f hi' . e ea,.

sprmg, weary. a ,0 dmg back and unable to resist any 1

h 1 t . h fl d' anger,

t ey e go WIt a 00" an eruption of green and' b Ii .

,. . .. . ' ,- e levlng

they re intoning a vaned canticle breaking away from th 1

" ' emse ves,

stretching out to all of nature, embracing it-they still only man-

age to produce, in copies by the thousands, the same note, the same word, the same leaf.

There is no getting away from trees by way of trees. *

"They express themselves through their posture alone."

No gestures, they merely multiply their arms, their handslike Oriental deities. And with this listlessness, they follow their thoughts through to the end. They are nothing but a will to expr~ss. Holding nothing back for themselves, they cannot keep o~e Idea secret, .they lay themselves completely open, candidly, Without reservation.

.Listless: they spend the time elaborating their own form, perfectmg t~elr own body, growing towards ever greater analytic compl~Xlty. Whereve:- they s~ring ~p, however hidden they may be, their one concern IS to fu1fill their self-expression: they prepare themselves, adorn themselves, they wait for someone to come and read them.

To a~~ct attention, they have nothing at hand but their posture, their lines, and at times an exceptional signal, an extraordinary appeal to the eyes and nose in the form of luminous, perfumed bulbs or swellings which are known as their flowers but

could well be wounds. '

This modification of the everlasting leaf must surely have SOIne meaning.

*

. Time for plant life: they always seem arrested, immobile. Look the other way for a day or two, a week, and their posture is further

39

refined, their limbs more numerous. Their identity is not in doubt, but their form has come more and more into its own.

*

The beauty of fading flowers: their petals shrivel as though touched by fire, and that in fact is what it is-a dehydration. The,y shrivel in order to reveal the seeds, resolving to give them their chance, an open field.

It is then that nature confronts the flower, forcing it to open up, to defer: it puckers, shrivels, it retracts, making way for the triumph of the seed, which emerges from the one that prepared it.

'*

The time of plants is represented in their space, the space they corne to occupy little by little, filling out a canvas that's probably set for all eternity. When it is done, a lassitude overtakes them, and there is the drama of a given season.

Like the formation of crystals: a will to grow, and the impossibility of growing in .any way but one.

*

Among living things, it is possible to make a distinction between those in which, beyond the impulse that makes them grow, some force is at work whereby they can move a part or the whole of their bodies, can roam the world in their own way-and those others for which there is no movement but extension.

Once freed from the obligation to grow, they first express themselves in many ways about a host of concerns to do with lodging, with food, defense, and eventually-when some leisure comes their way-diversions.

As for the second, which are untouched by these pressing needs, we cannot actually state that they have no purpose or desires but to increase in size, yet in any event all drive to express themselves is unavailing, except toward developing their bodies, as though for us each desire required us thereafter to nourish and sustain an additional limb. An infernal increase of substance prompted by every idea! Each wish to escape weighs me down with another link to my shackles!

*

40

Plant life is analysis in action, a first-hand dialectic in

- . b di . . f h' . space.

Progression y ivision 0 te preVIOUS action. For animals

expression is oral or mimed by gestures, each one effacing the one before. Expression in plant life is written, once and for all. No wa to reconsider, second thoughts are impossible: correction requires addition. Correcting a text that is written and pub_lished, is done by appendices, and so on and so on, But then again, they are not infinitely divisible. For each there is a limit.

Their every gesture leaves not merely a mark, as in the case of mankind and his writings, it also leaves a presence, a birth that is irrevocable and not detached from themselves.

*

Their posture, or "tableaux-vivants":

mute entreaties, supplications, composure, triumphs.

*

It is said that the disabled, amputees, experience a prodigious development of their faculties .. So too with plants: their immobility is the source of their perfection, their intricacy, their handsome ornamentation, their lavish fruit.

*

Not one gesture among their actions has any effect outside themselves.

*

The infinite variety of emotions spawned by desires within immobility has given rise to the infinite diversity of their forms.

*

An exceptionally complicated body of law, in other words sheer chance, presides over the birth of plant life and its disposition across the face of the globe.

The law of determining indeterminates.

*

Plant life at night.

With the inaction of chlorophyll, the exhalation. of carbon dioxide, like a long-drawn sigh of satisfaction, as when the lowest

41

string of stringed instruments, as slackened as may be,vibrates at the limits of music, of pure sound, of silence.

*

THOUGH PLANT LIFE WOULD SOONER BE DEFINED BY ITS CONTOURS AND ITS FORMS, I SHALL FIRST PAY HOMAGE TO A VIRTUE OF ITS SUBSTANCE: THAT OF BEING ABLE TO PERFORM ITS SYNTHESIS SOLELY AT THE EXPENSE OF ITS INORGANIC ENVIRONMENT. THE WHOLE WORLD AROUND IT IS NOTHING BUT A MINE FROM WHICH THE PRECIOUS GREEN VEIN DRAWS WHAT IT NEEDS TO KEEP FORMULATING ITS PROTOPLASM-IN THE AIR, THROUGH THE CHLOROPHYLL IN ITS LEAVES; IN THE SOIL, THROUGH THE ABSORBING CAPACITY OF ITS ROOTS, WHICH ASSIMILATE THE MINERAL SALTS. WHENCE THE ESSENTIAL PROPERTY OF THIS BEING, FREED FROM CONCERNS OF BOTH LODGING AND FOOD BY THE SURROUNDING PRESENCE OF AN INFINITE SOURCE OF NOURISHMENT: Immobility,

THE SHRIMP

A number of traits or circumstances make one of the world's most retiring objects and perhaps most elusive targets for contemplation, out of a small creature that might initially be less important to name than to evoke with caution (leaving it to enter on its own the coils of circumlocution), and ultimately to grasp through words at the dialectic point dictated by its form and environment, its mute condition, and the pursuit of its own true profession.

First, let us note, there are times when a man, his eyes clouded by fever, hunger, or simply weariness, may experience some fleeting and probably benign hallucination: he glimpses small flecks that spring about in a peculiar way from place to place across a field of vision-with sudden, halting, repetitious motions and reversals, followed by slow returns-rather faint, translucid, shaped like tiny rods, commas, other punctuation marks perhaps, which, while never even slightly concealing the world do somehow smudge it, superimposing themselves and eventually making

42

him Wish to rub his eyes in order to do away with them, to enio a

return of dearer vision. J y

Now, in the d~main of external. perceptions, an analogous phenomenon sometimes occurs: deep m the waters of its habitat, the shrimp darts about in a similar way, and since the specks mentioned just above were caused by optical problems, the little creature seems at first a product of marine disturbance. In fact it usually shows up in places where, even in fair weather, this disturbance is always at a peak: in hollows beneath rocks, where liquid contradictions ebb and flow incessantly, and amid which, in layers of pure density scarcely distinguishable from ink, the human eye, however much it strains, perceives no certainty. A translucence as effe tive as the creature's darting motions ultimately removes, even when seen immobile, all semblance of continuity from its presence.

We're now at the precise point where we must ensure that no vague illusion fostered by this difficulty and doubt is allowed to prevail in which the shrimp, almost instantly relegated to memory once dose attention proved unavailing, could languish there as a mere reflection or fleeting, strong-swimming shadow of species more tangibly represented on the sea-bed by the lobster, prawn, rock lobster, and in cold streams by the crayfish. No, without a doubt, the shrimp is just as alive as those lumbering behemoths and experiences though in a less down-to-earth way, all the pain and anguish that life everywhere entails , .. H the extreme inner complexity which sometimes animates them is not to prevent us from paying tribute to their most characteristic forms in the artful rendering they so deserve-only to dismiss them later, should the need arise, as some nondescript ideogram-this use of them must still not spare us the sympathetic pains that any study of life inevitably arouses: a precise understanding of the animate world surely exacts that price.

What, incidentally, could add greater interest to a specific form of life than an awareness of its reproduction and dissemination by nature, in millions of copies at the same moment everywhere, in cool and abundant waters, in fair weather or foul? Though many individual shrimp suffer from this arrangement, enduring its particular damnation wherever it occurs, this factor does foster our desire for clear perception. Objects that make timid subjects, ostensibly eager to raise doubts-not so much each one

43

concerning its own particular reality, as the possibility of being subject to a somewhat extended study and held in a somewhat gratifying conceptualization. Ready power centered in the taillike a pack of hounds on the attack at the least provocation. FUm, rather than architecture for instance, is more likely to make eventual use of such a notion ... But first, the art of living had to draw some benefit from it: we were bound to take up the challenge.

VEGETATION

Rain is not the only mark that hyphenates the earth and sky for there are other sorts

less intermittent

and so much denser that a breeze

enough to make it tremble won't carry off the fabric.

If it manages in season

to detach some minor matter

that it subsequently strains to whirl to dust in the end we recognize

that nothing has been lost.

A closer look reveals one

among a thousand doorways to a giant laboratory opening before us

bristling with its varied forms of hydraulic apparatus each far more complex than the simple shafts of rain

and perfectly endowed

as filter syphon retort alembic all in one.

This apparatus is what the rain first meets before it touches ground

receiving it in a quantity of little bowls packed in at every level

across a certain depth

arranged to spill over from one to the next down to those at the lowest level

by which at last the earth is directly watered.

44

This IS their way of retarding the shower

of retaining fluids for the good of the soil once the storm has passed.

They alone possess the power to make the rain forms glisten in the sun

or in other words to display from the viewpoint of joy

the reasons as scrupulously accepted as they were precipitately formed in. sadness.

Curious occupation, enigmatic characters.

They increase in stature according to the rainfall but with greater regularity more discretion

and through a sort of momentum E en when the rain is over.

At least we still find water

in the flasks they form and bear with blushing ostentation which we call their fruit.

Such it seems

is the physicalfunction

of this tapestry in three dimensions which

for other demonstrated properties and above all for the sort of life that animates it has been named vegetation ...

But I wanted first to press the point that though the ability to carry out

their synthesis and regenerate unasked

even between the paving at the Sorbonne relates the vegetal contrivances to the animal

the vagabonds of every breed nonetheless in many permanent locations they form a fabric

and this fabric belongs to the world as a layer of its foundation.

45

THE PEBBLE

The pebble is not a thing that's easy to define.

If a simple description will do, we can begin by saying it is a form or stage of stone between rock and gravel.

But already this suggestion implies an idea about stone which must be justified. Let me hear no reproach as I delve far back on this subject, back even before the Flood.

*

All rocks are descended through scission from the same gigantic forebear. One thing alone can be said about that fabled body, namely that once past the stage of limbo it never again held up.

Reason grasps it only as already amorphous and prostrate in the viscid tremors of its final agony. The mind awakens for the baptism of a hero of the whole world's grandeur, only to come upon the ghastly floundering of a death bed.

Instead of skipping ahead too quickly here, the reader should pause to admire not some dense funereal terms, but rather the grandeur and glory of a truth that has succeeded, however slightly, in rendering those terms transparent while not being entirely obscured by them itself.

Thus, the sun now shines upon a planet already cooled and leaden. No flaming satellite remains to cast doubt on this point. All glory and all existence, all that provides vision and all that provides life, the source of all objective presence, has become centered in the sun. The heroes engendered by the sun, who once gravitated around it, have voluntarily gone into eclipse. Yet in order for the truth-whose glory they surrender in favor of its very source-to retain an audience and subjects dead or dying, they nonetheless keep up their unflagging orbits around it and their service as spectators.

One can well imagine that such a sacrifice, the expulsion of life from natures once so glorious and ardent, did not happen without dramatic interior upheaval. And there you have the origin of this grey chaos, Earth, our humble and magnificent abode.

And so, after a period of writhing and creasing, like a body tossing in sleep beneath the covers, our mythic hero, subdued (by his sentience) as though by a monstrous straitjacket no longer experienced any but intimate explosions, at greater and greater

46

intervals,. with a shattering effect on the mantle, growin colder

~~~ g

Dead hero and chaotic earth are now confused.

*

.Since the slow catastrophe of cooling, th~ history of this bodyhavmg once and for all lost both the capacrty to be roused and to recast itself into one complete entity-will be but a tale of perpetual disintegration. Yet this is the moment when other things begin to happen: with grandeur dead, life immediately demonstrates that they two have nothing in common. Immediately, abundantly.

Such is the globe's appearance today. The dismembered corpse of a being that once embodied the whole world's grandeur is r duced to serving as backdrop for the life of creatures by the millions, infinitely smaller and more ephemeral than itself. In places they are so densely packed as to completely conceal the sacred skeleton which once served as their sale support. And the infinite quantity of corpses alone, contriving to imitate the consistency of stone through what we call humus, has for some while now allowed them to reproduce without owing a thing to the rock

Incidentally the liquid element, whose origin may reach as far back as the one I've been discussing here, long since collected over expanses large or small, covers it, rubs against it, and by repeated friction accelerates its erosion.

Here I shall describe a few of the forms that stone, now scattered and humiliated by the world, lays before us.

*

The largest fragments-slabs all but invisible beneath the interwoven vegetation that clings to them, as much out of bounden duty as any other motive-constitute the skeletal framework of the globe.

Veritable temples, they are not structures arbitrarily raised above ground, but the imperturbable remains of the ancient hero who was truly on this earth not long ago.

Man, taken with imagining great things, amid the shade and scents of the forests that sometimes overlay those mysterious slabs, through imagination alone supposes them still lying intact beneath it all.

In these same places, a good many smaller boulders attract his attention. Strewn through the underbrush by Time, sundry crumbly balls of rock, kneaded by the dirty fingers of that god.

47

Following the explosion of their enormous ancestor, and inex- . orably struck down from their trajectory in the skies, the rocks have fallen silent.

Permeated and fractured by germination, like a man who has given up shaving, furrowed and filled in by loose soil, no longer capable of the slightest reaction, not one of them utters a word. Their faces, their bodies are crannied. Within the furrows of experience naivete approaches and settles in. Roses take a seat on their grizzled knees, carryon their naive diatribe against them. The stones accept them. They, whose disastrous rock shower once lit up the forests, whose duration is eternal amid stupor and resignation.

All around them, they're amused to see so many generations of flowers raised and doomed, in flesh tints scarcely more vivid than their own, whatever others may say, and a pink as pale and faded as their gray. They believe (as statues do, without bothering to say so) that the hues are borrowed from the glow of sunset skies, a glow in turn assumed each evening by the skies in memory of a far more extravagant conflagration, at the time of that celebrated cataclysm when, violently hurtled through the skies, they knew one magnificent hour of freedom concluded by the monstrous plunge to earth. Not far from there-at the rocky knees of the giants observing from the shores the foaming struggles of their foundered wives-the sea endlessly rips away boulders, which she protects in her arms, embraces, cradles, fondles, examines, massages, caresses and polishes against her body or tucks into her cheek like a dragee, then slips back out of her mouth and deposits on some hospitable gently sloping shore among a large flock already there within reach, thinking to pick it up again soon to tend it yet more affectionately, more passionately.

Meanwhile the wind blows, kicking up the sand. And if one of its particles, the last form and least of the object in question, should actually happen into our eyes, this is the way, through its own particular means of blinding, that stone punishes, putting an end to our meditation.

Thus nature closes our eyes at the very moment when we should probe memory to see whether information gathered there in prolonged contemplation might already have yielded a principleor two.

To the mind casting about for ideas which has first b

, h d on i ch h een nourIS e on unages su . as t ese, nature in respect to stone will ul ._

mately seem, too simplistically perhaps, like a clock whose mech ti_ nism is made up of cogwheels revolving at very different ratea though driven by a single motor. s,

Plant life, animals, gases and liquids revolve quite rapidly in their cycles of dying and returning to life. The great wheel of stone seems all but immobile and, even theoretically, we can grasp only in part its phase of slow disintegration.

Therefore, contrary to popular opinion which considers it a symbol of longevity and passivity, we can say that in fact while stone does not procreate, it is truly the only thing in nature which is constantly dying.

So when life-according to beings who are successively and rather briefly entrusted with it-suggests that it envies the indestructible solidarity of the setting it inhabits, it is in fact abetting the continual disintegration of that setting. And this is the unity of action that life finds dramatic: it has a muddled idea that its support may one day fail, yet believes itself eternally regenerative. In a setting that has abandoned all thought of moving and only contemplates falling into ruin, life grows anxious and frets about knowing only regeneration.

It's true that rock itself at times shows signs of agitation. This happens in its final stages when, as pebbles, gravel, sand, dust, it can no longer play its role of container or support for living things" Split off from the fundamental mass, it rolls, it blows about, it demands a place on the surface, and all life withdraws from the dreary stretches where, turn and turn again, it is dispersed and reassembled in the frenzy of despair.

Finally, I would menton as a most important principle, that all forms of stone, each of them representing some stage in its evolution, exist simultaneously in the world. In this no generations, no vanished races. Temples, Demigods, Wonders, Mammoths, Heroes, Forebears live side by side with their grandchildren. In his own garden any man can touch in living flesh each possibility of that world. No conception: everything exists" Or rather, as in. Paradise, the whole of conception exists.

*

*

If now I should wish to study one particular kind of stone

48

49

more closely, then the perfection of its form, the fact that I can pick . it up and turn it over in my hand, lead me to choose the pebble.

Then too, the pebble is stone precisely at the stage when it becomes a person, an individual-in other words, the stage of speech.

Compared to the rocky ledge from which it directly descends, it is stone already fragmented and polished into a. vast number of almost similar individuals. Compared to the finest gravel, one can say that given the place where it is found, and because man is not in the habit of putting it to practical use, the pebble is rock still in the wild, or at any rate not domesticated.

For the few remaining days it still lacks meaning in any practical order of the world, let us profit from its virtues.

*

Though rooted nowhere, they keep to their random site on the vast expanse. For all that it can uproot a tree or destroy a bulletin the fierce~t wind cannot b~dge a pe~ble. But by blowing awa~ surrounding dust, an occasional hurncane can ferret out one of these landmarks of chance from its fortuitous spot, centuries old, below the opaque temporal cover of sand.

*

But water, on the other hand, which puts a glancing sheen on things and imparts its quality of fluidity to anything it can cloak, manages at times to seduce the forms and sweep them away. For the pebble recalls that it was born through the exertions of this formless monster upon the equally formless monster of rock. And since its entity can only be completed through repeated applications of liquid, the pebble remains, by definition, ever docile to it.

Pallid on the ground, as day is pallid next to night, the very moment the pebble is reclaimed, the sea gives it back the means to glisten. And while there's no great depth to its effect, which scarcely penetrates the very fine-grained very dense agglomerate, the liquid's exceedingly thin though active adhesion brings about a perceptible change of its surface. The wave seems to burnish it anew, thereby dressing wounds she herself inflicted during their earlier trysts. Then, for one moment, the pebble's exterior resembles its interior: overall it has the glow of youth.

Yet its form withstands both elements to perfection, lying serene amid the unruly seas. The pebble simply comes through the ordeal smaller though whole and, if you will, stands just as tall, since its proportions depend in no way on its volume.

Once out of water it immediately dries .. In other words, despite the terrible stress it has endured, no trace of liquid lingers on its surface. It is effortlessly dissipated.

In sum, smaller day by day but ever certain of its form, blind, secure and dry within, by nature it would sooner be reduced by the seas than blended in. So when stone, vanquished, is turned at last to sand, water still can't penetrate as it does with dust. Retaining all marks then, except those that come from liquids, which merely erase the marks upon it made by others, it lets the whole sea filter through, and disappearing in its depths with no way to make it into mud.

Brought ashore one day by one of the countless dump carts of the tide-which since then keep unloading cargoes appealing to our ears alone, or so it seems-each pebble rests upon a heap of forms from their earlier stages and their stages yet to come.

Not far from places where a layer of humus still covers its enormous forebears, at the foot of the rocky ledge where its immediate parents' love-making carries on, the pebble lodges on ground composed of their seed, where the pick-and-shovel tide seeks it out and loses it.

But those places where the sea tends to relegate it are the most unlikely for all recognition. Its populations lie there known to the vast expanse alone. Each pebble considers itself lost there, lacking a number and seeing none but blind forces to mark its presence.

And indeed wherever such flocks lie, they blanket the ground almost entirely, and their backs form a surface as troublesome for firm footing as for the intellect.

No birds. Occasional blades of grass poke up between the pebbles. Lizards scurry over them, negotiating them casually. Leaping grasshoppers gauge themselves against each other rather than against the pebbles. From time to time a man will absently toss one far away from the others.

But these paltry objects, lost haphazardly in a solitude invaded by dry grass, seaweed, old corks and the assorted debris of human provender-imperturbable amid the most raging atmospheric upheavals-are mute witnesses to the play of forces dashing blindly until spent in pursuit of all beyond all reason.

*

50

51

I'll say no more, for this idea of disappearing signs leads me to reflect on the faults of a style that relies too heavily on words.

All too pleased for these first attempts to have chosen the pebble: for a man of wry perception could only be amused, though probably moved as well, when my critics say, "He ventured to write a description of stone and wound up in quicksand."

52