Midway through a hot summer's night, reading The Gnostic Gospels,
I
fell asleep—
There
was a stench upstairs whose source I couldn't fathom. Was it from
the snake, wrapped around this
almost menacing perfection--for it rests on the absence of life,
the visible stillness of death--appears in stones so variously
that one might list all the endeavors and styles of human art and
not find one without its parallel in mineral nature. There is nothing
surprising about this: the
investment of the landscape with rhetorical interest reflected
the explorers' linguistic practice, for the language
of exploration was not the language of dictionaries, but the active
dialectical utterance characteristic of travelling. If the landscape
was realized associatively, the crude attempts of that lost creature, man, could not cover
more than a tiny part of the aesthetics of its
bowl of fresh water? Even for these infernal days, the serpent
seemed too languid. "It looks flat," I said, thinking
it had malted. "Flat!" she laughed. "It's dead!"
a small brow of mountainous country
that lies about it -- an opening of only moderate size, large
enough to admit a man, but it reaches considerable depth...this
space is full of a vapour so misty and dense that one can scarcely
see the ground. Now to those who approach the enclosure the air
is harmless, since the out- side is free from that vapour in
calm weather, for the vapour then stays inside the enclosure,
but any animal that passes inside meets instant death.
I
awoke to reality, feeling bleak and wooden, settling again into
samsara, the drive from which so many people die raising their combs aloft and viperous throats / scaly; and lo,
their crested crowns shot flam by the roadside, the chariot was
a torch, sulphur the yoke, / the pole bitumen;
cypress was the wheel; / yea, poison made that
bridle-bit compact, / and lead that axle,
stolen from the blindness of their vision.
Last
heard from a year ago, when he phoned to say that, in exchange for
a painting, a patron had given him a ticket to Spain, did Paul ever
return? Or, entranced by the melodies in Cantabrian caves, is he
hoofing his way home as a rare reindeer?
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