The Volcanoes Inside Vegetables

 Gherasim Luca

A canoe made of hair, it seems to me, with soft paddles, gelatinous, like sea animals, beneath which a woman, entirely of crystal, rolls a ball from one lip to the other, is the image-archetype of pollution. During one of my pollutical nights, unhappily so rare, when the poplars lining up before my domicile adopted a compulsively fastidious aspect in their evening frocks, and the violins in my gestures assumed a discreet sound like torture instruments, my imposingly dauntless position regarding erotica seemed to me a disquieting distortion of metallic facial wrinkles on a metal face affixed on a body that accents only its rigid and osseous sections, neglecting the passive-voluptuous subtlety and incertitude of its weft, its lungs, the predilection accorded the scheleton in our current amorous life replacing for me in a demoralizing manner the popular image of death. I don't know to what measure the castration complex can be introduced into an enterprise, be it nostalgic and partial like this one, where the impeachment of a massive activity on the erotic plane is tested. I understand that sado-mosochistic game-playing transforms much of the schematic aspect under which I expound these matters, but what I wish to affirm essentially is that the male and its fabricated rigidity fills the eye that observes it from without with nausea. I am disgusted by the cuddly violence of the male and to this disgust can be granted with more authority than at any other time a certain objectivity because the unpleasant sentiment that I am subjected to finds me inside the phenomenon, myself personally occupying in the realm of the amorous a lightly sadistic position.   

The disdain towards the easy histrionics that accompany practically every time this ilk of active enterprise where sadism is not put into effect to its morbid or extreme degree, but is sustained within its general, theatrical contour, its gesticulations taking on an artificial path, causes me to envy the essentially apparent passivity of the female, because I find it more spontaneous in its reactions, more revealing, more vibrant. I am aware of the risk taken in terms of the consequences in the realm of the analytic which affirmations such as these may provoke and I believe I may lighten up the work-load of the eventual analyst if I were to remind him of the extensive masturbational exercises to which the author of these lines dedicated himself during his adolescence, exercises which still, from time to time, hold him in their allure like the scene of the crime the criminal. I confess though that my analytic file holds little interest for me because my personal position inside of a complex cannot exhaust the conclusions of a general character provoked by the examination of this erotic spectacle where one of the actors is vested in a rigid mantle of bones while the other is a nerve severed with a saw. For in order that the male's bones crack, in order that the marrow within them to spill out like veritable lava, they would need to be endowed with the nebulous and satanic consistency of a Marquis de Sade. It seems to me that it is not necessary to take passivity to its ultimate limit in order for it to become entirely sensitized. I see myself at the roots of a tree taken by surprise by a woman in a red T-shirt glued to her skin, with long black hair strewn in disarray over her shoulders, with eyes like burnt brush. The caresses or the bites of this woman are just as voluptuous to me, the element of surprise containing in its fulgurance a state of panic-arousal, capable of transcending any previous commonplace state. This horrific woman, if she is not sadistic to the extreme, if she is not lost to my sight to awaken the next day in a distant forest next to my cadaver, with her hands stained with blood, is frustrated in her pitch of frequency, in her howl of ash. I place my lips upon the eyes of this incomplete and minor image of passivity, the flowers, with hesitant butterflies swarming around them like vultures. In my bedsheets with drawn curtains, the circles around the eyes that I touch are silent electrical doorbells. The pores are at hand, I am a rubber ball, the hair is far above the head, my eyes tongue the mouth of this unborn woman. A tree on my forehead, transparent and somewhat sparrow, its leaves dropping loose throughout the room, o! what an odd spring. A thick smoke suffuses my arm and thin trails as from a cigarette exude from my fingers with their nails surprisingly stained in a promiscuous yellow. With these stained fingers I leaf through a papyrus, an apricot. Nights fall too quickly in my house for dawn to ever break. The rains within are quick, walls sway, weeds and canoes float upon my lips, perhaps they are my words. My words bite your thighs, it is as though my teeth were written. It is a delirious calligraphy, to be studied today by tomorrow's graphology inside pyramids under an immense block of ice growing in the middle of the desert like a miracle. The mysterious calligraphy of illiterates where images seem closer to the objects which have not been invented yet, the simulated calligraphy of illiterates. I open you up like a horse and look inside for the bridle bit, forgetting you already hold it between your teeth. Night falls again, it is night incessantly. It is the witching hour, permanently bewitching, where the consistency of your being is far more certain than flesh, your bewitching flesh, permanently bewitching. I caress your ectoplasm like I would a shark. I sip you from tall beakers of crystal propped up on living frog leg. I invite you, I shout you, I bestow a name on you, any name. Fog, hair, a mask of quicksilver over your eyes, the vegetables from our virtual gestures, the tiger sleeping on our voice and the salutation we perform reciprocally for one another from the window, lifting from our shoulders with two fingers our craniums like a hat while the trains transporting us in two opposite directions crash into one another like a snowflake. 

 Translated by Julian Semilian