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The blue iron-bed, the table, the chest of drawers, the window with bulging glasses. Maria, the wall paper of the room upholstered in black is a mother in mourning clothes.
My daily tasks are so disjointed : carpets, lace, deep mirrors where ghosts wander, nay, the chimneys, above all those very hearths wherefrom flames do fly in locks.
The barrel organs, the Latin books and the sunsets : I love that which may entail the disappearance of colours and shapes.
The train leaving the Gare du Nord, the boat from Boulogne, the rail- and the road-way … But what has become of the necessary undulations of the ground ?
The dials, their hands, in the sky, just a few stars … Behind the lamp, a pale and cold dawn rises, just a little milk running from a breast.
Marie is named after the holy Virgin Mary. Geneviève swallows her mother and grows like a rose bud. I didn't work well these days. I am a bad father.
There's the day of this world on earth with its smell of cooking and there's the day peeping through on to the page, white as death on Paul's or Anatole's cheeks. The Azure is dead, only blue remains.
On the lake a swan dies, its wings caught in the ice ; so much whiteness, so few soarings, so many tombstones, a life of paper : there are too many days in the week, I only like the Tuesdays and their tobacco pots.
Those suits, those wool or linen garments, those poses with moustache, cigar, one's hand in one's pocket made heavy over a book : pictures of what lives through words.
I know but just a few details from the Absolute. Trinkets, one would say and the next or previous fashion for, as you surely know, the mind presides over the making of every day life . We are looking for some kind of harmony, aren't we ?
Geneviève's fan and Marie's feather duster, this light wind I fancy on their temples, almost a kiss surely, but of no human lip. And over the River Seine, that other breath on the white sail : what remains for me from far away lands : just a green ribbon through the trees.
In the garden, apples and roses picked up by others. I love these flowers in bunches, these bits of nature, of perfumes, of cut colours.
The chalice, the foam, the diffuse God evaporated like blown bubbles, leaving behind something else I don't understand.
The crush of second-raters buzzes, shouting in those very haunts where, in the old days, some god was hushing.
Tell it to those who won't hear anymore about it, or to those who never had it in mind : one can't do without an Eden !
May be Méry, of course, but I won't mention anything about her. I'll only admit that love's desire rests on the substitution of a few vowels.
Her body dissolves in music such an algebra of gestures vanished and blown away, an alphabet of dresses and bootees, O my poem !
Méry, my little peacock ! To you only do I write simple words : why don't you want me ?
***
What I call an ideal, an absolute or an azure is after all nothing but my hope to be born at last here in this very world. I gave other adverse names to the reality I miss and wherein I live almost absentmindedly.
(Beauty could have been merry, cool and lively : a woman with round shoulders and gold ear-rings. I would have found that world mellow, if only my hunger had ever been able to be satisfied on fruit).
It's donkey's years since the hinges of our dream have come apart.
***
O muse, thou art feverish over that bit of sea whose map I've lost !
In a fit of pique, you wrecked and weren't supposed to believe in my poet's words ! They are but glorious lies ! You inspire them and here you are punished and put in the corner of somewhere.
Now thou weepest like mad, whispering in the deaf ear of the sea. Thou keepest repeating and moaning : « Don't leave me ! »
The heart is in one's throat ! It moves, it throbs too quickly, it hasn't the necessary wings ! Yet, it must content itself with feathers and twigs : a few lines or a few insects. It sleeps curling in one's breast … You wish you'd nest, O thou Muse yearning desperately for children !
In the open sea, on your rock, wearing your transparent plastic raincoat, your hair soaking wet, thou singest, O Muse, thou watchest sorrow beat and foam on the sides of the black rock !
Tell me, for which sailors, stupefied and drunk with gin or coke, didst thou, not so long ago, unfasten thy siren's dress ?
They still come close to the grotto, laying down chests filled with jewels, gold and myrrh, those one night Magi-lovers, but the straw manger remains empty ! It's been so long since God left with its tablets, it small loaves of white bread, its miraculous draught of fishes and its incense sticks …
The heavens nailed you on this island ! The heavens are but a heap of pebbles. Time passes, long-lasting, you draw crosses on the calendars, you get confused and mix eras and mythologies, you believe you are the Holy Virgin herself between the ox and the ass. In order to fall asleep, you count the flocks of white horses on the surface of the open sea, O Muse thou art alone and belong to no one, that useless blue over there went into your head !
***
« Daily » is said of everything recurring every day : of bread, newspaper, rising and going to bed, of eating and drinking &endash; how lucky I am to enjoy that peaceful rhythm of a healthy man, that luxury of boredom &endash; the everlasting weight of my body and the heavy dull throb of the heart beating the tune of time which is both mine and every body's …
Why does all that hold but by what denies and flees from it : mad flaps of wings without which I'd be but a mummy ?
(According to the Littré dictionary, « plain daily » is said of a fever occurring only once in twenty-four hours. « Double daily » and « triple daily » are those recurring twice or three times a day.)
***
O thou, anachronistic Muse ! Nowadays, life is so little meant to believe in those things !
I hung back the lyre, sold the plectrum, the oboe and the music box. Gone are the days of feasts, of concerts, of flutes and flower wreaths, of masks and buskins, of loudhailers and bugles !
The horse gave back its wings. The Hippocrene dried up its waters. Nothing but the huge cobalt-blue sea is left, but watching it, dying of thirst with one's feet resting on the pebbles !
***
Long ago did I dedicate a small opuscule to « the blue just beneath the surface of one's soul ». By dint of magnetization from the open sea, our long-lasting stances on the wharfs : what did we watch ? Towards which far away inside were we turned ? We were inexorably dreaming of something else.
I wasn't mentioning some kind of translucent Azure : no ethereal skies, but some depth and substance within us of some sky instinct, e.g. the way it sniffed the smell of salt, the way it wept while watching a film or, in the winter, how it tried to choose some pullovers and shirts just for their warmth …
***
With your cigarette in your mouth, your curlers on your head, you hoover, you beat the carpets, you wash and mend, you put the linen in piles with lavender bags in the wardrobes, you take care of our house, you save its memories, its smells good of both wax and soup, you pick up my pens and my copy-books that lay astray, you put my books back in order, you delete and erase, you trim my desires and my thoughts, you broom in front of our door. O thou Muse cleaning words ! where did you hide the Sunday hymns, the white shirts and the prayers ? O thou Muse of the daily stereotype !
***
Could you quench our thirst from the water of the sea as cows do from the river. Since no water from here does quench our thirst. No way to be satisfied, no human love sufficiently vast and deep. O to die loving so badly, haunted by something which will never occur ! O for all this blue caught in one's heart. Both dream and heart swallowed together. We suffer from an « acrid urge ». O to be for ever at last that boat which sinks from every scar !
These running of black ink over the white page are but swarms of insects of a greedy azure unable to fly off. A gesture is all that remains, a gesture waving towards the wharf, pointing at the handkies and the skirts.
Man's head thus becomes porous, like a sponge, an old stone, a piece of wood thrown on to the coast. The heart is porous too, red outside, blue inside with streaks, cavities and bruises. Cardboard boxes filled with folded letters, statuettes' nooks and crannies, ex-votos, embroideries, ribbons and locks of hair. All remnants of a ship forever gone, flotations, our loves, their ribbons, their vapours. Must that child we once were be compelled to die of thirst ?
Stéphane Mallarmé smelt of cold tobacco.
