Tuesday, August 03, 2010

Changeling in 4 Instances

Only at the expense of the clumsiest exhaustion the gifts of daylight, transparent and sterile, seem to rain from above but without any particular source; he might well stand outside for the hours in between half inebriated by the chaotic demeanour of the floortiles that resemble more a palette of colors protruding in greys mixed with reds, there is this sterile sense of clairvoyance obtained from the sequence of the days shoveled by patience into one continuum of light, afterlight and the indoor purple muteness of the night. The skylight showers the first rays of sun seen in a fortnight and he is surprised to feel warmth on his decolored shoulder other than the alternating changes of temperature in the most varied forms of recoiling, kneeling and suffocating from cold itself.

There's no other feeling through the hours but the absence of worded imprecations on the part of an intimate distant acquaintance, but he is somewhat comforted, the yearning itself is far more pleasurable than the complicity in this reckless plot to unearth beauty from some place, from some space in which they stand, barefooted, sensual and yet childishly loving; it seems to be inappropriate to think of love without the impeding dragging of risky casualty, perhaps it is a good thing to be exiled from this friendly imprisonment and instead, to enjoy the silence and the rather dull company of this icy chunk of memory. There's this total unrest, coupled with a certain aesthetic satisfaction but the abscence becomes an empty space filled with his own flesh, and as if in olden times, the other body, and not even a body, but mere expressions and wrinkles, satisfaction of lips and language of hands, covers the whole geography of yet another motif; an impossible messianicity that tiptoes on knees and knuckles, on the palms of the hands and the forehead, it is allowed no further.

But then again, it is this beautiful skylight, broad like a river at night, trying to pierce through the earth below and reach him by the ankle, beautiful, the light, but just as helpess, tardily enunciated, unletting go of the big vault of heavens, a feeling so intense, never a sentiment, running deeper than a grasshopper's jumps into the void mouth of the rattlesnake, more like a sense of discomfort at the height of the bellybutton than the purer and sterile infatuation of poets and others that looks for lips where only brushes and papers are set aside for viewing. The tiny room seems to contain everything vaulted within, the cheap reproductions of lifeless paintings, the table maps, unused drawers, pencils and papers, the distant litanies of a family, written after the style of prayers but anchored far away, where he can't reach them, where they are to no avail. There are other days, higher up the scale of the historical forces, but they are quietly inferior, less distinct, less formless and just as vague, but never bordering on palatal pleasure.

We learn the world from images! He muses for himself, trying a hand at less singular thought, something less personal, that shall require the imagination more than this difficult skill of human trust. It's difficult to feel unhappy in such moments, the sheet replaces the skin of the tree, the mud and the fly, meandering in a woodland of false touches of the hand, unmolested by the geographical lie. There're still some sounds that manage to pervert the harmony of the ebbing tide, no serendipitous waters reaching from below, there's nothing mad in the flight, just the soft and sweet surrender of the fingerprint to a different order of joys, less honest and also less interesting but not as crude, not as indifferent, not as solid. Somehow he is fascinated by the daylight, wondering, pondering on the whereabouts of legs and limbs, of the other; not entirely uncomfortable with the newfound solitude, with the transient pedantry of the silence in the chamber, there's still so much a person alone can do with a piano and the yearning seems prettier than the overweight of extant telegrams. It is so strange, all of a sudden, for a character in a novel to go missing, just like that, he can't remember any particular details, deliberately almost. Oh, he's at last relieved from the curious ignorance: It was not a sanderling, it was the changeling! There's no anxiety in his waiting for the right lines to come up, it's more like the sort of sympathies one has for the fatherland he left, they're not quite dead but neither real they are.

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