The sister’s Saturday

(to my incest)

This Saturday

Love unbuttoned her cheesecloth chemise

On the ground the buttons rattled

We rushed to bite her breasts of smalt

We panted, isn’t known if we really wanted this

Some kisses with alcohol echoes

While the fingers tumble – panic

in the whirling marsh

of your underwear’s elastic

We have closed our eyes (and looking at times)

Closed, no idea of how much I suffer

The wonder pleases me, you could cope to not despise me

We act as drunk to forget it

The buttons were poorly undone like when the lights turn on

We call to the taxis of love, what is its name today?

Kill the fatigue

This is what love is

What I am giving you for love’s sake

You retract your belly, the breath is ended

You curb the hand that pushes through the lumber of your hair

Yes, there, at your not forsaken Death Valley

There, where are rumbling the ranges of the cowboys

I would have wished to be you

To halt, to hinder the other’s hand, those fingers

As olives in a bough

Then when untangled, to divide my sweat drops

Like flute keys

From the sliver of my heart inside the lap

To rekindle my rare water

Saturday. The love’s bell struck

Struck as in “struck down”

From its belfry to the ground

So fell the teeth gnawed rope

And the bell ringer fell too

With his hands bloated

For the others’ celebrations

ERVIN HATIBI (1994)

reflections

Our consciousness being a kind of mirror, it follows that we appear to ourselves only symetrically altered, like the image in a mirror. Everything that passes through consciousness must therefore be corrected and inverted for the true effigy (the essential, paradisiac form) to appear.  This is part of the illusion of the world, whose trajectory can be corrected only by a suplementary artifice. We have to undo this mental turnabout, with the simulation of an inverted image — showing us we shall never actually appear to ourselves.

Hence, the betrothed at a Pakistani wedding together enter a room in which there is a mirror. They look at each other only in the mirror. In this way each sees the other as they are in paradise — this is to say, as they are really, in the transformed, essential image eternity provides for them, and not as they ordinarly appear.

log on

Everything before taking place, should have the chance to not occur at all, to don’t take place. This suspense is essential, like the negative in the photo. It is this negative which enables the photo to have a meaning, although a false or constructed meaning; it is the negative which enables it to take at least place — never the first time, always the second. For things have meaning only the second time, like in the second coming of Jesus, baptism in anabaptism, form in anamorphosis. Hence the fantasy that there will be a second meeting, another chance, in another world or pervious life.

There it is never any definitive end to a relationship. All that has not been resolved, all that has not been said, must be there again in a second existence . It is in this reprise as Kierkegaard would put it, that the deepest pleasure lies: that of vanquishing time by the play of second meeting. All essential events play a second time(death alone happens only once, and is not replayable). But this second time time is also the last, and every event “reprised”, symbolically replayed, brings us closer to death. Once all events have been recapitulated in memory and cancelled by that evocation, one’s destiny is sealed and the end is nigh.

pause…!

 

The strategy of idleness – that it to say, the unshakable desire to escape the violation of our time by all kinds of predatory, futile activities-consist in putting off the point where those activities have to be done, spacing them so that they can be picked off one by one, as in the story of Horatii and Curiatti. The other form of idleness is impatience; it is finishing before we have started- which is a way of coming out free on the other side. Expectare, diluere, suspendere humanum est…
…I have to write to people I do not know, and have no wish to…and I think, considering the motives and the immoderate, incidental impulses for undertaking such a vain and exhausting effort of dealing with the unconscious simulation of figurative pain, that man is an exaggerated being and he brings a pathetic exaggeration to the world. Just what objective suffering results from this ought to be assessed-the pain of those things which suffer, if not from existing, then certainly, at least from the fact that we exist. This is why Stoic teaching culminates not so much in the avoidance of human suffering as of the suffering inflicted on the world by our exaggerated and superfluous presence. Surely there it is much more emotional pollution of the world then any other we are made to know off. One wonders what will become of it if all this was to be exposed.

 

medley

The compulsion to repudiate those things which are close to you: family, children, country, nation. As though you have to disown what is given to  you – for fear of loosing them or having to give it back? To keep e prophylactic distance from one’s own – but first from oneself, one’s own name, one’s own body, one’s own face.

And speaking of faces: you gauge the flow of time only through others, whose faces are much fairer and crueler faces than our own image. This is doubtless because we recognize them through all their changing appearances, while one never recognizes oneself: one always rectifies one’s image by reference to an ideal face from which one’s present face is merely an exception, and never a definitive one.

The Grammar of the Look

 II

God forgive me, but I decidedly hate chickens (the fowl). I had a bit less than to be able to say many in the home where I grew, which was that of my grandmother, a house situated on a foothill from where you could barely see the sea,(about which I always said that we had a proud vista of it), and a partial view of the old part of the city with its compacted houses and quite different from ours. Pervasively strange for me, even while the house and its environs were laid on a somehow perceptible slope our garden seemed placidly flat. When I was a kid, several times through living, I tried to teach some tricks to the few animals we had and kept in our scarcely spacious garden, loosely, and absentmindedly planted with some oranges, a fig, for some time a kaki.  There was a dear, immemorial but a finite mulberry which started their sequence, two peaches, several vines covering accidental patches of the spatial surroundings and others shadowing precise parts of the roof. And in the middle of all there was a lemon which in its best days timidly will mingle its branches with a rather daring but hollow pomegranate through which withes I always dreamed to hide, but invariably I would end to be embraced by the intimate shadow of the apathetic canes that were the border of the yard. Prod by Pavlov but mostly inspired from Chekhov’s “Kashtanka”, a book that I liked to open time to time, not as much because of those plotting impressions the first books I read knit in me which I failingly tried to unweave but mainly because its watery and uncontained, wine colored graphics, dispersed and borderless over the pages as on blotting paper, streamed, without loosing shape, vertically and quietly till they stood in abeyance, as some living tattoos on the boneless palm of the room or on the transparent abdomen of the garden, variably where I brought them, and they in turn suspending me while I was hastily pleasured by them because so I imagined it will be the memories I believed I would have, I could manage to teach how to perform some simple numbers to a duck, to a cat and to a rabbit. This last one I probably have only imagined. But exceptionally (from the other animals) I never succeeded, never achieved anything with chickens, no matter how hard and long, patiently and hardheadedly I tried for more than a year, it(the chicken) never learned anything, at all. I have never experienced something so distressing and gloomy and at the same time irritating, and perturbing because it was so excessively hopeless and inexorably stupid. I decided from that time to never permit myself to fall into the chicken trap again, as it was the first noteworthy trauma (drama) of my life, I definitely concluded and ruled that any time I will see patterns of that behavior to any object or living matter I would have to keep my unalterable or otherwise, only ever growing distances from them.

unended

I was leafing through badoo – not because I was looking for someone, anyone, one, but precisely, simply, to counteract the thought that I don’t, I have not, I am not—having in view, being effectively aware of the fancy fact (which is not as ironic as it might feel, and by derivation quite arguable) of me having usurped myself a space, blotting it with my real photos but unreal face— being altogether the same as the ones whose photographs I was suggestively sliding. All this happening only as in a commanded, hence, reversible catatonic state permitting only my finger to iterate a movement as to protect by that occasional ritual the other slide, that of myself, into the sacred homeostasis of the rest of my body, and at any rate of my mind, from the very vistas which that otherwise insignificant movement was diffusing. I wasn’t allowing, searching or expecting anything to happen, including these lines, but only giving by a conscientious, and yet to a degree a variable, tendentious, and at times antagonistic sympathy, a paroxysmal chance, a dropping, unarticulated hope, for what was in view to, at least, seem more than it seemed to be, to be more than just there. And yet, only to find that there was nothing else to be found, except the quasi-automatic in its mobility, whimsically and linearly scattered mass of squarish spaces. Statically eddied by faces, bodies or both, revealing nothing more than an incoherent, visceral and imploded, however unreal or perhaps just unrealistic, or still— probably and again hopefully so, solely by some kind of empathic mercy—an unrealized existence, leaving thus the space for a future understanding. And I was remotely, but revealingly reminded of this heavy, funereal, and absurd volumes entitled—rightly but roughly translated “The Undying Stars”— containing the photos of the 28 thousand dead fighters. The killed, the unfailingly called martyrs, of the ‘The National Liberating War’ or depending on circumstantial discourse also called ‘The antifascist war’. These (by reminiscence), those (by distance) photos were triggered, trapped and embalmed in pale shades of grey. Bolted and bared through some impalpable contrast that was all imaginary and ghastly. Criminally or candidly retouched, the faces looked as they were the visages of vacuum packed phantoms. The features of these cut heads and busts were doughy, sleety, whispered. Folding one into another as some dry, grey argil vortex, suffused, transparent and melted. And at times, some tired hand or head, a tearing, inexperienced or myopic eye, or just by a pure although fictional, malicious will, could or would manage to not fuse an indomitable nose, a leaping cheek, a branched eyebrow. Features that were sprouting or falling under a bulged or undercover front, a tormented or inexistent lip, a swallowed or on the contrary an Aryan jaw, that might have been left as they were, or all the same, changed for that matter, to an unexpected form. This, while trying a desperate, useless, unlucky and unfathomable rearrangement(one could never tell), that would avidly avenge against their counterparts, coming in full prominence, sublimating the rest of the face form its solid, however improbable state, into some icy vapors through which it will float, reminding one perpetually, non the less, of the face that a moment ago was there, never of the man, and now contracted into only one feature, making it a structure, that turned to be that face, imparting and impairing it mystically, irreparably, repressively. They would cause, while flipping the thick, luminescent, creamy white colored pages, as through a virtual chain reaction, the intangible induction of an inoculated, viscous and charged mood. Was the air that first will start to wither and languish, weighing less and less, becoming remote, ancient, and subterranean, from the contact with the images, being infected by a passionless, but inexorable grief. And so the world contained in it would lose colors, usage, and weight, and would gradually skid to its bleached negative. I would feel needless of it for a while, till I would have to respire it again and feel to be filled with a gaseous, sickning gloom. It wasn’t because of being reminded of death or by their existence through it, but because of the representative deceit that the death has sealed and fermented into their actual presence.

c_thru_feet

 

…while the impetus to a vicarious possibility might be a metaphor of a more evolved, hence, complex credence, as it can be nothing of this at all, but only an expression of light irony and humor (which I enjoyed in both cases, and the third which I haven’t figure out yet, only to taste at a later time my evasive observations) still, I have read of people that could really see through their feet. I was informed on these portentous curiosities through some translated Russian bulletins on vulgar science, of which writers, under the narcotic urge to promote evolution theory, would spare no length of going far, and thus often entering into cabalistic domains, into regions of occult seen through the myopic light of ideological science as new territories of joyful discoveries. So one of the articles were about blind people that could see (discern) colors through their feet or palms. The author made a fairly articulate (although pathetic enough) case to let the reader believe and understand that the most rigorous measures have been effectuated to assert the truthfulness of the miraculous pretenders. And …it was true! So he wrote! But then – I am reminded – this word, ‘the blind’, brings a glossy, eddied, color mixed series of associations.

A parenthesis here – it has become quite an unchallenged creed, that I have never read something that would stand out as something wholly new to me, except as adding something unexpected – this is to say that; from my childhood readings, which have provided me with few subjects, – ideas or visions if you will – everything that came afterwards, that happened to be read by me, unsought, was organically connected with these first apparently accidental interests. Those readings seemed to be from the beginning as threads of the same tissue, only, not in the sense of weaving, but of unmaking it. It was a call.. I could have in view in their entirety the intricate designs, of which patterns I could manage to distinguish, however, without being able to put them together, to discern where they fit, except for only recognizing their existence. I mean that it was difficult to be aware and perceiving of the overall view and the details at the same time. I had to go at them one by one, taking them way, unweaving, undoing them, while promising myself to remember everything, and at times forcing or alluring myself to that effort. This, in the hope of recreating it in my mind as by a sense of touch, not as a recollection of something seen.

 

As I was saying; the first thing remembered was ‘The report on The Blind’, a chapter in ‘On Heroes & Tombs’ of the Argentinean writer E. Sabato. And immediately after that this passage, form another book of his ‘Abadon, the Angel of Darkness’. The author, who is a character in his own book, is in a café when somebody approaches him:

He wanted to write e thesis: Sex, Evil, Blindness.

S. looked at him in surprise. “It’s a complicated subject, I don’t know much about it myself. This is to say, everything I know is in the Report”.

“I understand. But there is one other thing. I believe I read in a biography on you that your Albanian ancestors fought the Turks in the fifteenth century. Do you know the legend of the city of the Blind?

S. was very much taken aback. What was that?

“I’m not terribly sure about this, I still have some looking into it to do, but somewhere in that area there’s supposed to have been an underground city of the Blind, with kings and vassals and everything – all Blind.”