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.