I return. Love has her head inclined, the hair greening her shining face and the silver moisture of her mouth. Horse has a sheet of paper on the table before him. His finger is reading it line by line. The other hand strokes vainly over his little brindled beard, sometimes in passing touching the hooked nose. His yellow eyes are striving to read between the lines. They do not see me. I don’t exist. Apparently they are unaware of the black wind sucking (at) absence just behind the door. This is the way things fall apart. Poetry is always also elimination.
I come closer. I can now hear Horse reading with the soft wing-yearning voice of seduction. Mumble, mumble, mumble, I hear. And then: Mumble mumble mumble Mum mumble mumbo mumb/Like a whiplash.
this unmemorable memory exists!
I know D.E. You could say as well as I’d know my own brother. Years ago when I was in prison, he passed on to me a sheaf of notes which I tried to make into a story. If you read Mouroir you may come across it. It was a generous gesture. I owe him a favour. Today, 22 June 1986, here in Rotterdam, I have the chance to repay the debt. It is sunny but not hot. D.E. has given me a speech to read. Thirty-four people are standing in the shade along the banks of a canal. Maga is here and so are Taraxippos, Bert, Kure, Harpagos, Phlogée, Djaran… We are taking part in the ceremony of saluting the tree of poetry. I shall now read the notes, the inaugural remarks. Nobody knows D.E. Sometimes the noise of passing vehicles drowns out my voice. A small girl watches me intently, a finger in her mouth. The branches are decorated with ribbons of many colours. And these flutter in the wind.
It is with an immense sense of satisfaction that I stand here today. The word dreamt in the anonymity of prison has become sap and fibre. It will be tangible like a tree. The present word may be a noise, like a passing tram, but the absent one is space. It is resonance. We are here to consecrate absence.
It is with an equally enormous feeling of awe and humility that I stand under this tree. The tree is a creator of space and this one here particularly so, because it is ancient and indifferent to human foibles, but still intent upon drawing poets to it, as if poets were birds — to the awareness of absence, of earth-forces, and thus to infinity.
We are here to inaugurate the as yet non-existent memorial to the unknown or the anonymous poet. Were I to do it in the correct way I would have had to stand silent. But just as the tree must produce space to be tree, the poet must create words to encapsulate the silence.
Elsewhere, I have communicated the mysterious notes that came into my possession while I was living underground, probably during 1976. At that point I was just passing along an old need; perhaps I was merely the unwitting instrument in the bringing about of a place where oblivion could be predicated and practised endlessly. And now we stand here and I have, too, a real feeling of recognition. This is the right place; here are the right people; these are the requisite elements: tree, water, the stones to come.
In parts of Africa — in Senegal, Mali and Niger, for instance — when a griot dies, and please remember that the griot constitutes the wordweaving memory of his people, his fellows will take the mortal remains to be hidden in the hollow trunk of a baobab. It is a way of positioning him for ever where heaven and earth meet and merge. Perhaps this tree here, the subject of our meeting — hanging tree, burial platform, labyrinth of budding life — could also be a place where poets will come ultimately to be consumed by the flames of forgetting.
And in Delphi, I am told, there is a tree just like this one, a plane tree also (maybe it is the very same one; what do we really know about the deep run of roots?), shading the Castalian waters. There, people went to be purified before going up to consult the oracle. There the Pythian maids, or the prophetesses, drank the water and munched the laurel leaves that would lead them into the dark-seeing trance. That, after all, was why poets were crowned with the poisonous wreaths. Delphi, the navel of the world where the young Apollo, son of heaven, was to slay the python guarding the entrance to the earth — thus inheriting the chthonian strength, the subterranean force, the hidden word. Thus is heaven and earth united. And we know that there by the water of Ga spouting from Parnassus,Apollo always spoke obliquely, in the form of verse, the way we too are condemned or chosen to do…
By all means, let us not be distracted from the horrors of our everyday realities; let us continue denouncing and combatting the killing and the maiming and the slow indifference and death of memory. But to be a poet — that is, to aspire to the grace of pain — however obscurely, means not to lie. Let us, therefore, then also validate that other reality, the blacker one of primordial poetry. Let us be where water flows and a tree grows, where there’s no conflict, where snakes make us dream and touch the deeper layers of integration. We must be intimate with ourselves, we must uncover the earth in us, the icy wall of eternal ecstasy, where stones live out their colours like washed-up petrified breaths of whales.
We want to express the secret vote of unquestioned belonging, to mesh consciousness and matter — and matter is awareness. We have to concretize the need not to make public. Here is our place of no name. The roof of the flame. No selfishness — just the purity of creation. It will be the bottomless hole which, for once, will have no function — except that, the most important one, of distilling a shared crucible.
I hereby declare that this tree, this unknownness, this unmemorable memory exists!
the thieves and the word
This happens once upon a time. In the past which we now evoke, there lives a man leading what passes for a normal life, neither good nor bad, smoking moderately and only occasionally drinking down to his knees. He has a cat, mice behind the wainscotting, the average gnawl of worries and a small stock of smiles to swap with those — neighbours and bureaucrats and retired army colonels now breeding rabbits — who come and go on the staircase. It is winter and the streets have the cold greyness of stone. He is on his way. He arrives at the cabaret with wind in his pockets and three words in the memory chamber when he suddenly plunges through a trap-door. What does it mean, ‘plunging through a trap-door’? Simply that with suddenness he sees a lady in that place of ambiguity and questionable reputation, a lady so exquisite, so sumptuous, that she must be a princess from a distant kingdom, that he dare not look at her. She does not see him at first, lost as she probably is in an ancient landscape of her own. He does not look at her but the corners of his eyes keep noticing her movements, like lightning in Africa. He cannot stop looking at her. ‘What is this, then?’ the man asks himself. ‘Did I fall upwards into paradise?’ It should be pointed out that the place is nondescript, neither big nor cramped nor frankly evil — why should it be? — with some smoke adrift near the ceiling and drinks to be had in the sad foyer. A black cape of shiny hair throws a shadow over the glitter and glance in the lady’s eyes. Then the miracle happens: the two protagonists actually come to exchange thirty-two words, eighteen by her and fourteen by him (eleven of which he borrows from her). And butterflies are blooming in the hands of the man. The lady’s hands, on the other hand, are small and reddish, and her hips must be as white as lips in the night. Her mouth moves with elegant desirability so that the man aches for the touch of her tongue. Too soon, too soon. Then she leaves with her entourage. The man follows her into the street, urgently, to catch a glimpse of the beauty of her buttocks-walk, and when he turns back everything is gone — no more lights, no smoke, no painted signboard, no office-box, even the one-eyed Lebanese frontman is gone with the wind — just the grey façade of a wintery street in a quarter where wee-pensioned concierges and minstrels and illegal guest workers come to die of tuberculosis and the misery of homesickness.