Mineral O! Statue of Desire

Gherasim Luca

I stroll along a rampart clutching under my arm a length of fog from which the abdomen of a woman, the lips of a woman on the abdomen of this woman are glued to the brumal forehead of a thinker from the past century pierced in succession by a saber, a fulguration, a flock, a cosmos of birds. This rampart, I don't know by what sort of miracle appositioned parallel to the ocean, I don't know by what sort of game of chance irrupting out of me and crashing against the vast ground swell hailing from far away, chaperones my strolls spawning the suspicion that I am in the midst of a city that has been recently excavated, perhaps a city at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps a city inside a porpoise. The hat on my head is purposefully outmoded, I sport a roaming astral retina, a threadlike mouth under a sumptuous mustache, exclusively enshrouded in velvet, my simultaneous approach to this rampart in ruins and to the ocean provoking me to suddenly secrete a bale of lachrymal salt. I nurse an impalpable lament as in a slumber where too many offerings are being sacrificed to you at once, the lachrymal salt trickles down my face in order to complete this landscape veritably oneiric where I prefer to remain permanently awake. 

My limbs are now spider silk and the sand beneath them does not even retain the tracks of my soles lightweight as respiration. It is more like a murmur, my stroll, a zephyr. In turn my cranium leaves behind it visible tracks and once home how exuberantly do I follow through a crack in the window the succession of craniums extending out into the remote and leashing the ocean to me. Yesterday I abandoned my home forever but not before I, before the tall bedroom mirror, put on a top hat of incessant vertigo simply for the satisfaction of subsequently spying on the incessant succession of top hats tumbling into the surf. Have I disposed of myself? I doubt it, once I have opted for this leisurely mode of disposal labeled life I can't conceive why my existence should have concluded yesterday. But perhaps my life is one thing while what came to pass surpasses what is surmised by the antinomy of life and death. I am entirely ridiculous. I should paint a sparrow on my face and hook to my buttonhole the map of a country from the history books. Progressively more ridiculous. I twist on the faucet in the bathtub, (yes, I do have a bathtub!), I shut the window, I eat a plum, I stare in the mirror, I organize my mustache. The mustache once again? How many more times do I need to bite out of this fruit populated by worms in order to be able to taste what has been labeled life's experience, in order to be no longer bewitched by the charm of its cadaveric putrefaction? The decadence of each gesture I execute like a death sentence and the aura that surrounds my head each time I think about corpses, about wax figures, about ruins, manuscripts half devastated by arson, about a spoon between the fingers of a woman putrefying leisurely on its journey to the mouth, about movements captured in slow-motion in old movies, but preeminently about mustaches, the mustaches of men at the turn of the century, provoke me to peruse the things that surround me with a retina that presupposes itself perused, with a retina of stone pursued by a stone of flesh and, impervious to how minuscule and how relative this casually passive and easy to violate position might be, I can't deprive myself of its morbid charm. I would prefer to posses the philosopher's stone in order to transmute lead to gold. I would prefer to murder a child and spare the life of a butterfly. 

My stroll to the Unending along this rampart in ruins would perhaps appear less perplexing if it were uncovered that in the great metropolis sufficient measures of the velvety blood of oppression were spilled. I am not accountable if the human being provokes me to disgust while the mouse doesn't (if I were to discover a mouse in my soup tureen, it would be far more palatable than a human being) with my head propped up on a pillow of bats, reclining on a grassy plain of carnivorous plants, next to a woman whose lips are bloody suctioning cups, whose hair is obsidian fulguration, whose fingers are plush pile shelters for slumbering escargots, while eavesdropping on the distant baying of wolves, slumber would apprehend me imperceptibly like the swaying of a riverbed. I fall into slumber with open retinas, omnipresent like antennas trained on wherever bedsheets with virginal aspect erupt unsuspectedly like a volcano. The more beguiling the oscillation between two complementary colors manifests itself to me, the more I distinguish that their encounter in a third color is no more than provisional and that in their intimate substructure, in their unconfessed grottoes strolls this ungraspable phantom, white, in its mantle of tears. Out of a coincident impulse, to a degree deviant, I find black beguiling, I find this underwater diver costume beguiling, this facial powder mascara, and the absential existence of this color in the ecosphere provokes me to ponder a long procession of cowls, a chamber inside a castle with cloistered windows, a fountain reflecting stars during the course of the day, provokes me to even ponder butterflies. 

“Combien de fois, au moment de mettre du bleu, j'ai constaté que j'en manquais! Alors j'ai pris du rouge et je l'ai mis à la place du bleu.” (Picasso). If I were a painter I would paint the trees in a landscape black and the pupil green. This exchange of colors between the eye that sees and what it is that is seen, apart from the theoretical value which I accord it in this grim antinomy where it occupies the place of synthesis, it corresponds on a lyric plane to the pallor of the human being who has been perusing its likeness for at least the last few tens of centuries in the echo of liquid, this narcissistic drama becoming, to the degree that the human being ceased to see only itself in this magical mirror, all the more convoluted in contemporary lyricism. This transposition of colors or fevers between the eye that sees and what it is that it sees, it seems to me is more alluring than two starving jackals that confer to one another the privilege to the next bite. Leaning over this magical looking glass the size of my eye and of the universe, I mistake intentionally my personal disquiet with that with that of humanity and find it unnecessary to keep in mind a sense of proportion when I ponder the passage of the woman who enraptures me through my chamber and that of a comet beguiled by the cosmic lure of the earth. And I am committing no metaphoric abuse when I liken the sliding of the strata that provokes earthquakes with the fingers she places over my forehead under which the plasma starts to quicken its pace, under which the blood begins to boil. 

It is time that this man makes an exit, this being with his head balancing on a tally and retina anchored to a caliper, which is preserved like holly relics in a basement in Paris, repulsive fetish of the occident. I breathe in the hair of the woman who enraptures me and a veritable forest fills my lungs, I grasp her lips between my lips and a veritable evening envelops me. In her vestment woven of wind and fog this enrapturing lover throws me kiss from her balcony without resorting to the intermediary of a rose. I ferry her in my arms along this rampart parallel to the ocean and while it dwindles into ruins our fingers sprout with leaves, birds warble, ivy soars, our tongue coils around a splinter of coal, we shatter it with our molars which suddenly transmute to a seeming alabaster. Could it be a mere exile from the kingdom, after this dolorous attempt to abandon the species, the repulsive human species, are we nearing the mineral realm, the vegetable, like those fish in flight, a tryst of wafting and tears? Tears and burning, could it be that they have adopted us? Are we their nuptial balcony, the dalliance park of the elements, this casino where life itself is to be gambled? Shall we pitch ourselves into the ocean, shall we hurl ourselves into the rampart? Shall we sink our teeth into the rocks, the waves, the shadow, the rose? Shall we costume ourselves in ruins and wrap this lump of sand in our gala frocks? Will you slip your satin slipper over the sand's foot? Do you think the phantoms taking up residence behind this rampart, the phantoms we await, will attend? Are we phantom enough? 

 Translated by Julian Semilian