Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

Forehead of the Rose.

Despite the open window in the room of long absence, the odor of the rose is still linked with the breath that was there. Once again we are without previous experience, newcomers, in love. The rose! The field of its ways would dispel even the effrontery of death. No grating stands in the way. Desire is alive, an ache in our vaporous foreheads.

One who walks the earth in its rains has nothing to fear from the thorn in places either finished or unfriendly. But if he stops to commune with himself, woe! Pierced to the quick, he suddenly flies to ashes, an archer reclaimed by beauty.


Threshold.

When the barriers to people have been moved away, sucked up by that giant flaw, the abandonment of the divine, words in the distance, words which did not want to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant pressure, there they decided upon the dynasty of their senses.

I ran up to where that diluvienne night issues forth, planted in the shaking dawn, my belt full of seasons, I wait for you, O my friends who are about to arrive. Already I can make you out in the darkness of the horizon. What I wish for your houses is not dried up by my hearth. And my staff of cypress laughs with all its heart for you.


To...

You have been my love for so many years,
My giddiness before so much waiting,
Which nothing can age or cool;
Even that which awaited our death,
Or slowly learned how to fight us,
Even that which is strange to us,
Both my eclipses and my returns.

Closed like a box-wood shutter,
An extreme and compact chance
Is our chain, our mountain-range,
Our compressing splendor and glow.

I say chance, O my hammered one;
Either of us can receive
The mysterious part of the other
While keeping its secret unshed;
And the pain that comes from elsewhere
Finds its separation at last
In the flesh of our unity,
Finds its solar orbit at last
At the center of our own cloud
Which it rends and starts once more.

As I feel it, I say chance.
You have raised up the mountain-peak
Which my waiting will have to clear
When tomorrow disappears.




To be a poet is to have an appetite for a discomfort whose consummation, among the whirlwinds of totality of things existing and foreseen, provokes, at the moment of closure, happiness. / René Char.


René Char was born with deep sadness ("I was born like the rock, with my wounds"). And not only experience taught him to breath, suffer, grow. He came to all that by his very nature. This is heaven to touch his incredible world of poetry of ineffable perfection. In 1952 Albert Camus, calling Char a "tragic optimist", hailed him as France's "greatest living poet".

The KNIGHT is kneeling before a small altar. It is dark and quiet around him.
The air is cool and musty. Pictures of saints look down on him with stony
eyes. Christ's face is turned upwards, His mouth open as if in a cry of
anguish. On the ceiling beam there is a representation of a hideous devil
spying on a miserable human being. The KNIGHT hears a sound from the
confession booth and approaches it. The face of DEATH appears behind the
grille for an instant, but the KNIGHT doesn't see him.

KNIGHT
I want to talk to you as openly as I can, but
my heart is empty.

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
The emptiness is a mirror turned towards my
own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled
with fear and disgust.

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
Through my indifference to my fellow men, I
have isolated myself from their company. Now I
live in a world of phantoms. I am imprisoned in
my dreams and fantasies.

DEATH
And yet you don't want to die.

KNIGHT
Yes, I do.

DEATH
What are you waiting for?

KNIGHT
I want knowledge.

DEATH
You want guarantees?

KNIGHT
Call it whatever you like. Is it so cruelly
inconceivable to grasp God with the senses? Why
should He hide himself in a mist of half-spoken
promises and unseen miracles?

DEATH doesn't answer.

KNIGHT
How can we have faith in those who believe when
we can't have faith in ourselves? What is going
to happen to those of us who want to believe
but aren't able to? And what is to become of
those who neither want to nor are capable of
believing?

The KNIGHT stops and waits for a reply, but no one speaks or answers him.
There is complete silence.

KNIGHT
Why can't I kill God within me? Why does He
live on in this painful and humiliating way
even though I curse Him and want to tear Him
out of my heart? Why, in spite of everything,
is He a baffling reality that I can't shake
off? Do you hear me?

DEATH
Yes, I hear you.

KNIGHT
I want knowledge, not faith, not suppositions,
but knowledge. I want God to stretch out His
hand towards me, reveal Himself and speak to
me.

DEATH
But He remains silent.

KNIGHT
I call out to Him in the dark but no one seems
to be there.

DEATH
Perhaps no one is there.

KNIGHT
Then life is an outrageous horror. No one can
live in the face of death, knowing that all is
nothingness.

DEATH
Most people never reflect about either death or
the futility of life.

KNIGHT
But one day they will have to stand at that
last moment of life and look towards the
darkness.

DEATH
When that day comes ...

KNIGHT
In our fear, we make an image, and that image
we call God.

DEATH
You are worrying ...

KNIGHT
Death visited me this morning. We are playing
chess together. This reprieve gives me the
chance to arrange an urgent matter.

DEATH
What matter is that?

KNIGHT
My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering,
a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no
bitterness or self-reproach because the lives
of most people are very much like this. But I
will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed.

DEATH
Is that why you are playing chess with Death?

KNIGHT
He is a clever opponent, but up to now I
haven't lost a single man.

DEATH
How will you outwit Death in your game?

KNIGHT
I use a combination of the bishop and the
knight which he hasn't yet discovered. In the
next move I'll shatter one of his flanks.

DEATH
I'll remember that.

DEATH shows his face at the grill of the confession booth for a moment but
disappears instantly.

KNIGHT
You've tricked and cheated me! But we'll meet
again, and I'll find a way.

DEATH
(invisible)
We'll meet at the inn, and there we'll continue
playing.

The KNIGHT raises his hand and looks at it in the sunlight which comes
through the tiny window.

KNIGHT
This is my hand. I can move it, feel the blood
pulsing through it. The sun is still high in
the sky and I, Antonius Block, am playing
chess with Death.

He makes a fist of his hand and lifts it to his temple.

In the night there are of course the seven wonders of the world
and greatness, tragedy and enchantment.
Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets.
There is you.
In the night there are the walker's footsteps the murderer's the town policeman's light from the street lamp and the ragman's lantern.
There is you.
In the night trains go past and boats
and the fantasy of countries where it's daytime. The last breaths of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
There is you.
A piano tune, a shout.
A door slams. A clock.
And not only beings and things and physical sounds.
But also me chasing myself or endlessly going beyond me.
There is you the sacrifice, you that I'm waiting for.
Sometimes at the moment of sleep strange figures are born and disappear.
When I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and fade
and come to life again like fireworks made of flesh.
I pass through strange lands with creatures for company.
No doubt you are there, my beautiful discreet spy.
And the palpable soul of the vast reaches.
And perfumes of the sky and the stars, the song of a rooster from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and kisses.
Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads.
No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know.
But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
You who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion
but who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed in dream as well as in reality.
You who in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beach
where crows fly into ruined factories, where the wood rots
crackling under a lead sun.
You who are at the depths of my dreams stirring up a mind
full of metamorphoses
leaving me your glove when I kiss your hand.
In the night there are stars and the shadowy motion of the sea,
of rivers, forests, towns, grass and the lungs
of millions and millions of beings.
In the night there are the seven wonders of the world.
In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep.
In the night there is you.
In the daylight too.

/ Robert Desnos. Sleep Spaces. A la mysterieuse 1926. Translated by Amy Levin.

Someone just died, but I’m alive and yet without a soul. I have nothing but a transparent body within which transparent doves fling themselves upon a transparent dagger held by a transparent hand. I see effort in all its beauty, real effort that cannot be measured by anything, just before the appearance of the last star. The body I inhabit like a hut and on lease detests the soul that I used to have and that stays afloat in the distance. The time has come to be done with this proverbial duality that has been blamed on me so much. Gone is the time when the turbulence in lightless and ringless eyes welled up from pools of color. There is neither red nor blue any longer. The unanimous red-blue fades out in turn like a robin refbreast in the hedges of neglect. Someone just dies--neither I nor you exactly, nor they, but all of us, except for me who survives in many ways: for instance, I’m still cold. Enough of that. Fire! Fire! Or stones for me to cleave, or birds for me to follow, or corsets for me to lace tightly around dead women’s waists, and so to make them come back to life and love me with their tiring hair and their chastened look! Fire, so we don’t die for brandied plums, fire so the Italian straw hat won’t be just a play! Hello, lawn! Hello, rain! I’m the unreal breath of this garden. The black crown set on my head is a cry of migrating crows because until now there were only those buried alive, just a few of them, and now I’m the first of the aired dead. But I have a body not to be done away with, to compel reptiles to admire me. Bloody hands, mistletoe eyes, a mouth of dead leaves and glass (the dead leaves stir underneath the glass; they aren’t as red as you might think when indifference lays bare its voracious techniqes), hands to gather you, miniscule thyme of my dreams, rosemary of my extreme pallor. I have no more shadow either. Ah, my shadow, dear shadow. I have to write a long letter to that now lost shadow. I’ll begin by: My dear shadow. Shadow, my dearest. You see. There is no more sun. There is but one tropic out of two. No more than one man out of a thousand. No more than one woman out of the absence of thought which characterizes in pure black this damned age. That woman holds a bouquet of everlastings in the shape of my blood.