lans for M.
Last night in the dark, one saw a birch’s white trunk; abrupt from the grassland it…its white boughs slantwise up, one saw the pale-gray fume of foliage, or it was a spray springing from the trunk, or the trunk sprayed and sprang, white were the branches, truly white was the bridge. One saw it clearly, yet I saw only half of everything.
Since it’s impossible to hide behind an invented character, considering how far time has progressed, how long since we passed the zenith…since there’s no ignoring the first person that begins every sentence, it’s a gratuitous act of violence to explain why so many statements won’t let us complete them, for that first person shapes them so exclusively that even so small a word as loomed, in sentence with an I, inevitably leads all the way to Babel…today’s genius is indistinguishable from today’s moron, therein lies the violence. Gnawed by night-gas, the throat speaks, see the lake one last time, see how it rises, how it loses its shores. See the whole of it, the view of the far shore was hubris…weary of an obedient future, sick of ceding the field beneath the brain-pan to a censor from the beyond.
A brook that flowed into the lake gathered pale mist-masses over its calm water, filtering like snow into the towering bales of the bushes, lamps mounted on telegraph poles illuminated the ghostly chaos, and upon the flowing mists all at once there appeared, as on a second airy level of reality, more black gleaming leaves seeming to sprout from breath-clouded mirrors. After I’d passed a slicing wall of light, and, still blinded, crossed a stretch of shadows, I saw the lake, and above me the half-circle of a high white-painted bridge, an old backdrop, but to me the bridge seemed purely imaginary, only the upper part of its arch was visible, its feet, on either side of the brook, vanished in the blackness. A human construction, a framework of concrete and white-painted metal, only the top part intact in the lamplight, resting on both invisible shores. An old internal method of mine compelled me to see everything only halfway.
The unmoving water, just beyond the phantom bridge it, before the brook merged into the, lake already shoreless, as I too, abruptly on a tiny patch of dirt and grass, marooned on an island sinking in the mists amid erratic currents, I found myself in shoreless, unmoving water just past the brook mouth, where it seemed to rise to great heights, into a darkness unknown all around, unnoticed in past nights without sleep and waking, a light, shoreless, shore-long; how in one single sentence the night described itself transformed into water; the rising moon, trembling at its edge, a disc distinct as neon.
I didn’t dare press onward, as though afraid to go the whole way too soon, I knew that suddenly one’s wandering unconscious in the unseen, planting one’s feet in the heights between the stars, weightless, casting off one’s precious weight; one rises, lans, head-down over the stars, overhead the deep water, underfoot the deep sky. I swayed, turned away, I grasped the railing of the bridge, damp scabby metal, a breath of air stirred, making the water gleam, the stars in it lengthened to fissures of light, some bird cry startled from sleep scraped my senses.
I’d scented the summer’s fragility, the terminal humming in the metal of the vowels that I could feel stuck so detachably in my throat, that had a tang of aluminum…that indefinite but essential after-effect of sleeplessness from which I counted off muddled rhymes to myself, from which, lest I be forced to sell to myself as my own customer an utterly mercenary realism, I would either have to return to antiquated words, ghostly, ghastly, grizzled (though not long ago, reading old Russian books—implicit rededication to a long and happier epoch of my language—I’d noted an utter refusal to use such words to make sense of reality; but in the late fragility of my affiliations literature appeared as an alternative to language), or be damned to silence…I perceived the end of the season, not without the hoped-for artificial loftiness, when, pouring red wine one morning, I glimpsed in the very first glass a hair that had clearly emerged from the bottle, floating as though on a film of grease, distinctly recognizable, in thickness and curl, as a pubic hair; I poured the wine down the drain, instantly the sink was washed with bright red, sending up a stale-sour, metallic smell. That was the end, all my strength and fierceness vanished, I was no longer robust enough to endure the summer’s faintly spoiled smell, the tiniest tainted drop sufficed to fatally infect me.
I’d been overzenithed by an artificial reality, and I had to get back to the bottom of things, had to part water from earth again, if need be rename the old light by which I did so.
Nevertheless I got drunk on the same wine that same day, couldn’t sleep again that night and went out in the dark, cicadas and frogs, the rustle of leaves that had withered to paper, nothing but noise I’d already grown unused to, I sensed that I’d cast off nature, cast off my head-down consciousness…which at last, it seemed, was more unnatural even than nature.
Fooled by moon and neon, I walked swaying, once again that aluminum taste, aluminum smell in the mucous membranes, it was the same gray oxide that glittered on a metal fence, in the dim glow of the lights strung up there, at my back the black park, before my eyes the red, yellow, blue lights, between which I looked down into a large sports stadium, center of the late-summer park festival that was drawing to a close, its hubbub ebbing early that Sunday evening; down there, as well, lights linked the black leafy mountains of the treetops; the smell of paper lanterns burning somewhere in the grass, the slimy smell of sausage stands gone cold, the clink of glasses being washed in a zinc tub, a single burst of bleating laughter.
The bridge had let me cross the brook, not thirty years till the end of the century, and still no renunciation of that reality that never truly began, still no real beginning to that inevitable other half, so let’s be off, let’s cast off from it all, that was the point of the laughter that warmed me, and back to the town with its decrepit new buildings, neobuildings, windows mostly dark already, though in a few, as pitiable relics of the will to illusion, cheap fluorescent tubes between curtain and window are switched on to illuminate the house plants, the aquariums, a dim music-hall violet driving Impressionism to despair, and as the aluminum oxide flakes from the facades’ sick skin, I sense the clinical gleam of the chemically treated tiles, the perfumed toilets, the nylon underpants soaking in the sink.
(Ghostly, ghastly, groundless. Shoreless sensation of my ancient disgrace. The lost proof. Bazarov, if only you could come and punch me in the nose. But you’re rotting, done in by antediluvian frogs, you wasted nihil under your white birches.)
The mahogany-grained pressboard wall units, the trash bins plastered with Marlboro labels, the bookshelf with the Abridged Encyclopedia of Health.
Acceptance. I’m off, away from my youth’s splendid season, away from seeing the whole thing, away from the crickets. What was really white was the bridge…in the daylight, I’d seen how the old crusts of its paint layers blistered, brown from the gnawing of the rust underneath, and many of the blisters had already burst, openly revealing the sickness; the red-brown scabby wounds spread, and only in the valleys between them did the white paint prevail, blackened by the entire summer’s greasy dust; real paint, its blight doing justice to its reality…over the bridge I’d returned from a once-sacred wilderness, and the hope that the bridge would collapse behind me went unfulfilled. The town that lay before me, that I’d beheld in anticipation of the pestilences I’d partake of there…like a forgotten cloister garden I’d have to fill it, in a mystical act, with the chaos words of Genesis. For those cicadas under the resounding firmament could no longer be lulled to sleep, the night a hollow cavity, the hollow singing of summer, lans, a tuning, an open beginning. The dark sobbing of waters reduced to a puddle. In which too now, one believes, in the nights of undiminished heat, lakes are great reservoirs that influence the weather, how artificial, if one recalls the most natural things, in sentences, one believes, visibly riven by lightning-like malformations that portend the unseen half, the hollow shapes of the nights, rearing like cathedrals shading into blue, which the believing spirit enters amid astral electricity, Luna suddenly, filled the whole puddle, blinding white-kindled water where dead trees spun, torn loose.
Artificial primordiality, cicada weather, thought up by the moon brain, under the pallor of the mental firmament where day breaks over rapid far-from-human sentence fragments describing the collapse of the town, under the neomoon, half
seen and off again,
the beginning is open