From: "Clifford Duffy" <cwduff-AT-hotmail.com> Subject: the man Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2001 03:51:09 -0400 Gherasim Luca This translation is dedicated in fraternity to Will Alexander >From one temple to the other, the ebony blood of my virtual suicide drains in virulent silence. As though I had committed an actual suicide, the bullets criss-cross my brain day and night, uprooting the ends of my optical nerve, my acoustic, my tactile, these terminals, and dispersing inside the skull an odor of detonated gun powder, of clotted blood, of chaos. I haul on my shoulders this suicide's cranium with a noteworthy sort of grace, and lumber from one place to the next a malignant grin, poisoning over a radius of numerous kilometers the breath of all beings and things. Perused from the outside I appear about to tumble like a man who's been fired upon. It is my customary strut in which my uncertain silhouette borrows something from the vertigo of those about to be guillotined, of loose rats, of wounded birds. Like a tightrope walker propped up merely by a single umbrella I fasten myself to my own disequilibrium. I know by rote these routes without knowns, I can wend my way with eyes shut. My gesticulating lacks the axiomatic ease of the fish in water, the grace of the vulture or the tiger, they appear wayward like anything you would glimpse for the first time. I am forced to invent a new mode of ambulation, of breathing, of being, because in the world in which I move about there is neither water, nor earth, neither air, nor fire, to warn me beforehand if my means of locomotion should be swimming or flying, or whether I should step forth with two feet. Inventing the fifth element, the sixth, I am forced to revise my compulsions, my customs, my certitudes, because for instance to cut across from an aquatic life to a terrestrial without first shifting the determination of your breathing apparatus is equivalent to death. The fourth dimension (5, 6, 7, 8, 9) the fifth element (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11) the third sex (4, 5, 6, 7). I salute my double, my triple. I peruse myself in the mirror and spy my face full of eyes, of mouths, of ears, of ciphers. Under the moon my body casts a shadow, a half-shadow, a ditch, a quiet lake, an onion. I am indeed indiscernible. I kiss the woman's mouth without her discerning whether she was poisoned, chained inside a tower for a thousand years, or whether she fell asleep with her head on the table. Everything must be reinvented, no-thing exists anymore in the whole world. Not even the things we can do without, those things our existence appears to depend on. Not even she, the lover, this supreme certitude, her locks, her plasma we disperse for her with such voluptuousness, our emotive apparatus which her cryptic snicker unleashes every afternoon at 4 o'clock, 4 o'clock, this would be enough, this pre-established and dubious causality of a 4 o'clock for us to suspect any ulterior embrace, any, but absolutely any human initiative contains this mitigating and mnemonic character of a 4 o'clock, even the fortuitous encounters, the noteworthy romances, even the suddenly striking crises of conscience. I peruse the filthy blood of the man full of clocks, full of registers, ready-made romances, full of fatal complexes, full of limitations. With a disgust I have learned to ignore, I propel myself among these pre-staged personalities, among these unending dependabilities, male and female humans, dogs, schools, mountains, quotidian and faded terrors and thrills. For a few thousand years now you put forth this axiomatic humanoid of Oedipus, propagate it like an obscurantist epidemic, the castration complex man, the man of the natal trauma, upon which you prop up your amorous encounters, your occupations, your neckties and your purses, your progress, your arts, your churches. I detest this natural son of Oedipus, I disdain and abjure his pre-established biology. And, if this is so because man is born, then all that is left for me is to abjure birth, abjure any axiom even if it boasts of the appearance of a certitude. Upholding like a curse this quotidian psychology-consequence of birth, we will never unearth the potential of bursting into the world extrinsic of the natal trauma. The man of Oedipus deserves his destiny. [...] If the woman who entrances us doesn't invent herself before our eyes, if our eyes don't abandon the timeworn cliché of the image upon the retina, if they do not allow themselves to be magnified, astonished, surprised, and drawn into a region perpetually virgin, then all life appears to me like an arbitrary fixation upon some age of our childhood or of humanity, a mimicking of the lives of others. Indeed, then life becomes a theatrical routine where we interpret Romeo, Cain, Caesar, and other macabre personages. With these corpses we cross like coffins the distance that separates birth from death, and it doesn't stun me that the servile brain of humans could conceive a picture of life after death, this simulacrum, this prefabrication, this repulsive posturing of the pre-established and counter-revolution. I breathe in the scent of my lover's locks as though we flared up into the world for the first time. Anything can occur in this world without a past, without points of reference, without knowns. To breathe in the scent of the lover's locks with forethought, incognizant and contemptible, to then kiss her on the mouth, to shift from the preliminaries to possession, from possession to a state of rest, and then to a new state of arousal seems to me the very prescription for the straightjacketing technique of this congenital cliché which is the human existence. If in executing this simple act: of breathing in the scent of the lover's locks, we do not gamble our life itself, we do not engage the destiny of the last atom of our plasma and of the most distant star, if in this modicum of a second in which we execute in their totality our doubts, our riddles, our disquiet, our most contradictory aspirations, then indeed love is, as the pigs announce it, no more than a digestive function to perpetuate the species. For me my lover's eyes are as somber, as foggy, as vast, as any star, and only in light-years should you measure the radium of the glances she shoots me. It seems to me almost as though the relationship of causality which connects the tides to the moon phases is more curious than this exchange of glances (of fulgurations) in which, like in a cosmic bath, my destiny and the universe resolve to collide as though in a tryst. Brushing with the tip of my finger the lover's nipple, what occurs then on the strata of stimulation is an actuality, but a partial actuality, because anything could occur then - this gesture will not simulate except on the level of the pictorial, descriptive, the gestures of other humans as well as my own - brushing then my lover's nipple I would be stunned if it weren't abruptly midnight, if her flesh weren't suddenly layered with lilies, or if the bellman didn't bring me a letter enclosed in a thousand envelopes. On these uncharted territories which the lover, the chair, the drapes, the mirrors, present us with, I blissfully abolish the eye that witnessed, the lips that kissed, the brain that reasoned, like match sticks that serve me, but only a single time. Translated from the Romanian by Julian Semilian & Sanda Agalidi CONTENTS _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.
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