When the hunter is resting does the hare stop leaving tracks, Alex Cecchetti

Solon He had wandered too far off. That’s what he was thinking. The heat, the thirst, the chirring of cicadas was calling him towards something as yet undefined. He stopped. Slaked his thirst

at the water’s edge. Lay down with his head on the rock. He found himself contemplating those conversations. The chirring of cicadas, the rustling of the wind in the tall pines, the brook bubbling as well, and still the heat. He was almost eight, you see? And he thought that all those frr frrs and krr krrs and even glug glug glugs were conversations. He noticed them. He

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when the hunter is resting,

does the hare stop leaving

tracks? Or:

A l e x C e c c h e t t i

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(THeAuTHorIzednArrATIVes)

didn’t understand them at all. A little while later, he also noticed a sense of solitude. Not nostalgia, but true solitude. He tried to be quiet, even silencing his thoughts, his fear was of being tracked down. Yes, being discovered, caught, but by what? In any case he was good at lying there that way, head on the rock, motionless, so as to not be caught. Frr frr krr krr glug glug glug thock, silencing his thoughts wasn’t easy. His eyes roamed all around, and even if he didn’t want to know the leaves were green, leaves they re-mained. He decided to put an end to this business of them being leaves and even managed to forget their name, but they stayed there and went frr frr. And everything else, needless to say, was also making quite a racket. And so he closed his eyes since that was all that could be done and tried to mix things up a bit. Like camouflage, someone covering himself up with a bit of this and a bit of that. He gave the frr frr to the things that went krr krr in the bushes and the grass. He gave the glug glug to the rocks and hand-ed out a few thock thocks here and there to things he couldn’t even remember having seen. Then so on and so forth until sleep plugged his ears for him.

When he woke up, the disk that gave off light was still high above the things going frr frr and there was still that krr krr and glug glug and then shrr shrrs and zzz zzts and some truly odd dring droos. Now he was afraid. He shouted and cried out where are you all? Krr krr where are you shrr shrr where glug glug are you zz zz dring drooo oooh frush frush help help krr krr thock thock groo gruck zzr zroom wah wah dow dow shh shhh kra kra hel hel.

Later on he became a person who knew a thing or two; he understood mathematics, reasoned about reason, and disobeyed traditions but in secret.

Calchas

He made it past the age of eight with no trouble at all. Besides, he perceived that five is also a word, a colour, a snake, and even some-thing else that came and went.

The habit of an experiment, Solon and Calchas

What ensured the experiment’s success was a simple rule. They had to meet up early in the morning, their stomachs still empty like animals going to hunt. It made no difference where, though they tended to prefer the marketplace. What’s more, they sur-mised it was the round shape of certain kinds of fruit that made the concepts spin around so well. All those melons, lemons, apples, but above all oranges, when there were any, gave their

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words not so much the right colour but the right shape to roll. The war: there was one, but everybody talked about that already.

— Imagination is like a fit of delirium. A hallucination is an image, a scent, a concept that you see or smell or think when it’s not there. When there’s nothing to see, smell, or think. The difference lies in one’s state of consciousness. Madness and imagination are played out through similar processes.

— Is that why you brought the head? — Killed this morning.

One ear of the calf’s head was poking out through the paper.

— What do animals tell us about this whole business? Nothing. No, the head is for the brain. That’s the tenderest part. Imagina-tion can be shared. You just have to choose the right words. Like that man who made soldiers and horses appear where there were none. There used to be a science, the science of the orator. Now they’re all charlatans, but not back then. That was when painting was still just a fancy, an invention, and writing was banned. Back then there were people who could point to the emptiness in front of everyone and say: there, look. And everyone would see.

— It happens even today. Look. What? Nothingness. — Perhaps, but they’re not as good at it. All right, let’s take this head. I could do an autopsy without touching it if I had the style it takes. I wouldn’t even need too many words. That man who made soldiers and horses appear could have done it. He could have pointed out this head, sliced its eyes open with a word and passed like a blade through its tongue, without even touching it. He could have made you taste the brain in your mouth.

There were precedents. There had been no rain for some time. A clear sky for days. Sunshine too. Under the calf ’s head a small puddle of blood had formed. Free of rhetoric, a few flies were cir-cling around it.

— Men whose eyes caught sight of this invisible brain would be delirious. If we listen to a story and see what is narrated, we are in a fit of delirium, a hallucination: an image, a scent, a concept that you see or smell or think when it’s not there. Look at this city. Someone must have designed it. Many people came together. They talked about it. They imagined it. They saw it before it was built. This city is born out of a fit of delirium. It’s madness.

ALexCeCCHeTTI WheN The huNTer…

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They looked around, instinctively. From what they could see, it was a fine city. If there had been madness here, it had been worn away, by the coming and going and bumping and spitting.

— The difference between delirium and imagination is deter-mined by a state of consciousness, remember? You said that. So where is the consciousness?

— Consciousness is less than nothing. It’s a magician’s handker-chief. The stuff of acrobats.

— If we start with consciousness it will keep us busy all day. The taste of the brain cannot be found in the brain.

— On the contrary, let’s haul it out. Let’s enter this delirium. Let’s track down consciousness, hunt it out. Let’s imagine that this head belongs to a living man. I’ll open it up. Inside is a brain. Pulsing in its jelly. Let’s suppose I could draw a map of this spongy, whitish thing. I slice it up, draw and colour its parts, name them, discovering perhaps that each part also makes some kind of noise every time my victim thinks, speaks, or moves his arm. I will never be able to show you where consciousness lies. I will never be able to say: here. That’s obvious. I could say where memory lies. Perhaps I could manage to say that he thinks about colours here, and mathematics over there. Look, here behind the ears is where we feel pain. But consciousness is something else. It implies a combined effort. It’s not the orchestra, it’s the music. Now we need to see that orchestra, here in front of us. Cellos, double basses, wind instruments. Anything you like. I could tell you where the viola is, of course. But the music, the symphony, where is that? There’s a chorus too, you see? Over there. When the chorus is done singing, and they all go out drinking and then go home, what can we say about their voices? These men who are roaring, snoring, spouting drivel, are those still the same voices that were singing? The same voices that had us believing for a moment that we were hearing angels? Or should we think of them as liars, petty impostors?

— If consciousness is music, then memory is theater. A past that is restaged. It calls back all the actors and drags the chorus mem-bers out of bed, pulls them away from their women and passes out the script, different every time.

— This could mean something very important. It could mean that if consciousness is a secondary phenomenon, if its qualities can be altered by a series of situations that might or might not occur, then this man’s bared brain can easily go on without him. That is, it can link images, create narrative structures, imagine different

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worlds, without the chemical combination of consciousness that we call “self” being aware of it.

— I’m getting hungry, but I have to say: this spectacle you’ve set up is a dream.

— So man dreams without himself.

The water used to freshen the fruit and vegetables ran in streams, mingling with the slime of the fishmonger’s stand, and then the clearer water of the fountain. In the street it had formed puddles here and there where the world was mirrored in reverse.

They considered going down to the harbour, but did not. They talked about it for a while, as if to examine the option. Giv-ing rise to this unfortunate rhyme:

To see some fishing boats come in, it might not be too late. We could find good deals. Yes, swap your head for bait.

— What is this man whose brain we’ve bared, but a victim? Of course, we could call him a hero. He has sacrificed himself to a new god. His name may be inscribed in books one day, never in the stars. Now, this minute, as we speak, there may already be a small group gathering around him. They have not discovered where consciousness lies, but are not resigned. Now they’re look-ing for his dreams. He sleeps and they take notes, of every move-ment, every sound. These white noises produced by his bared brain come from points scattered all over. A hundred noises in the place where we see colour, other signals there behind the ear. How many signals does it take to reconstruct the world? And then there’s mathematics, memory. A chaotic blizzard, hundreds of signals all together. What could those men possibly say about dreams? They declare them useless, finding no form of will behind the muddled, erratic squawking of their calculation instru-ments. Observed from the outside it might seem chaotic, incon-gruous, without rhyme or reason, but what this man experiences in his dream is absolutely coherent to him.

The tree they had chosen as shelter from the sun cast a kind of shadow that was pleasant to their skin and eyes. The calf’s head lay between them. Glimpsed from a certain distance, they might have looked like two big cats amusing themselves with a mouse.


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— Who could deny a man the right to say he has seen his future in a dream? He has seen his past as well. All night long, the dead gave him no peace, and if he followed their advice and went astray, it was because there is no escape from the curse of the departed. On another night, in another city he loved another woman, a woman with three names. The very angels lifted him into the sky with the sound of their voices alone. Who could refute all of this? The man who sold me this head, the butcher. It was dawn, his eyes were tired, red, as if he hadn’t slept a wink. He had slept, I tell you, but sleep is not rest. All of us constantly have this feeling upon wak-ing, as if we had spent the night elsewhere. For some indefinite period we were somewhere else, perhaps someone else. Again, how could one assert the contrary? It is not true that men are deluded about everything; the objects of their illusions are always the same, but they give them masks so that they won’t be forced to recognize them every time.

— One of the most horrible things that can happen to a child is to see their parents making love. What rubbish. I think the most horrible thing is to see them asleep. So pale, lying there motion-less, mouths open, as if dead.

When they ran out of subject matter, their eyes wandered all around, in search of something, an image, a sign, that would sum-mon other thoughts. Nothing worked better than oranges. Some children had begun asking questions about the calf’s head. It is the Minotaur’s son, the pair replied. They had cut its head off to hang it up as a trophy. So the children began arguing about whether it was silly to hang up the Minotaur’s head without the rest of its body. Others found it perfectly natural and began asking ques-tions about the labyrinth. After a while they broke off some branches and picked up some stones and set out to kill the Mino-taur’s surviving sons, confident that they would find other, smaller ones.

Lullaby, little moppet, little bullock-headed poppet. We will quietly come creeping, to your cradle as you’re sleeping. Hushaby, not a moo, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Let’s all play a game of revolution, you can be the tyrant,

[we’ll be the population.

— Every man and woman knows that they will be irredeemably alone in their dreams, which is why we exchange that last farewell of the day. A dream is an extreme state of solitude that we only share in telling it, at our return, upon awakening. We know that

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dreams exist, from the incessant retelling of them that runs through all our history and to which we immediately ascribe authority: the authority we grant to the person speaking here and now because he has been there and then. We’ve been told time and again: here and there are special categories of language that also stand for life and death. The here and the hereafter. Being there and not being there. If sleep resembles death, in its posture, in physical rigidity, or in the abandonment of consciousness, then upon waking it has all the value of a voyage. Look here: I know a sailor who has never seen the sea.

— Of course. What is there to say besides water and storm? — Horizon?

They felt a jolt. How long had they been sitting there so uncom-fortably? Perhaps it was a reaction of their numbed muscles. Per-haps the word had produced an effect, it felt like it had wrung them to the bone. They had seen this thing arrive on other occa-sions in the form of an image, a sound, an animal, always contain-ing the dangerous idea of a limit both finite and infinite. More than once they had had to defend themselves from similar intru-sions. Was this an enemy they were powerless against? Or did its power derive from their shortcomings? They knew that their words were empty, but they sat in silence nonetheless, just the time it took, pretending the only thing that itched was their behinds. The marketplace was filling up with people buying, sell-ing, stealing.

— Everyday, along this same road, they walk to the ruins. They climb up to tell their dreams. As if they were messages from some god. Warnings, omens. How can they think that other men understand this language? How can they believe that dreams are even the shadow of a language? What god, but a evil god, would want to talk with men in words incomprehensible to them?

— Man is this imperfect being that sends dogs ahead of him in the hunt. He does not trust his instinct, so he must interpret every-thing. I understand your way of looking at things, but you are mis-taken. This calf’s head cannot talk. It couldn’t even do that before. What it says, we are saying ourselves. The calf says nothing, and since it does not speak it cannot even tell its death. Ask my butcher, his big chunks of meat are never dead, they are always fresh. Ani-mals do not die, they turn into meat.

— Reason, not instinct, is the cause of violence. Good cooking and divination come into the world hand in hand. One examines


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entrails, the other cooks by naming them. Try to remember: in dreams, images tremble, transform, struggle. The man speaking to us is a multiple, the woman guiding us is a trinity, bridges become boats and objects are melancholy. Space slows down, time jumps, and symbols are painfully reunited with emotions. All of this takes place through an immediate form of knowledge. Now, instantly. The man you have chosen as a victim cannot reconstruct all of this for us. So he will attempt to tell a story, put things in order, try to provoke smiles or surprise. He hopes that once we have had our fun we will let him go. Interpreting his improvised pageant, believing it to be his dream, would be a mistake. What would it lead us to? We have interpreted only his language, his words. We have redoubled the double meaning and fallen irredeemably into the ridiculous. It would have been better to listen to his tale as if the dream had never taken place. A person who interprets will end up transforming the subject of his investigation. This is the ultimate meaning of interpretation. There is no such thing as reading without transformation. Tying together rafts, nailing down roofs, this is the kind of work that existed before words and interpretations. That is why down there among the Christians, the father of man is a carpenter.

— Are you perhaps forgetting what was taught to us with such effort? Remember, there is nothing in the chest. That is the only mystery. The chest is our only object of meditation, because nothing is contained in it. Or are you one of those people who imagined hidden treasures? A man dreams he is condemned to death. It is the day of his execution and the guard has left the cell door open. So the man tries to escape. Inexplicably, all the doors of the prison are open for him. He starts running, and feels hope and courage swelling in his heart. But in a long hallway, he encounters his guard. The guard does not try to stop him, or chase him, but only asks him calmly: what would you like to eat this evening? He can have everything he likes, fulfill any desire, even a dish fit for a king, because that is to be his last meal. The man is gripped by horror and flees, running faster, then finally comes out into the street. And there he runs into his closest friend and embraces him, pleading for help, but he too asks the same question: what would you like for your last meal? The man flees again, tries to reach home. He encounters other acquaintances, then his brothers, but they all ask him the same question, over and over. Finally, he finds his house. His wife comes to greet him. He is happy, he feels safe. The woman embraces him, kisses him, then she too asks: what do you want this evening for your last meal? So he realizes that there

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is no escape from his fate. There is no way out except to wake up. What a lucky man, he was only dreaming. Now that we know his worst secret, however, what can be said of him, if not that he was recognized by his whole community?

Some men had gathered round. They sat on baskets of fruits, sucking on peach pits, spitting out seeds. Someone said that the man would have been wiser to keep that dream to himself. Puah! Puah! He had shown that he felt guilty, but had omitted the source of his guilt. To his enemies and friends, to his brothers and wife, any reason at all would serve to find him guilty now. Someone else said that the man’s guilt lay in eating, he had realized that the ultimate consequence of satisfying his desires was some other man’s death. He had desires, and desire itself was his crime. A woman said she knew the man, that she had already heard this dream. So everyone started asking what his name was, but the woman didn’t remember. Someone stood up indignantly and said she was protecting a murderer. An old man wearing a hat made of large leaves kept repeating that this was just a story, like the stories painted in noblemen’s rooms. Something to talk about, but not real. Then someone said that the man with the dream had been entrusted to do something and this task was what he was fleeing.

— The task of a man in this city is to be recognized and thereby become himself. So perhaps this man did not want to be what he had become in the eyes of all.

No one seemed satisfied with this last statement. It did not explain the guard, or the cell left open. They quickly got tired of the story and began telling each other their dreams. The shadow slowly shifted and everyone shifted with it, just as slowly, moving as the sun climbed higher.

— We are this will to speak nothingness. — No, I have not forgotten. Inside the chest, like in the dream, every non-sense that comes out is an excess of sense, it is what provides meaning. But all this language cannot obscure the beauty of the image, the absolute originality of a palace built by music or the recurrent metaphor of the whole world as a prison whose only guard is death. Dreams have to be bizarre, that is how we shake off the world while remaining tangled up in it. We toss and twitch like horses.

— Animals cannot tell us anything, true, but we always take them with us, don't we? Do you want to trade this head for your mule?


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Or was it a horse? The condemned man realized that behind every desire there is only one desire, the desire to reach the end, to arrive in a place where one can only look back. It is not his flight that delays the execution, but his encounters. And as always, the ques-tion does not expect an answer, but is a metaphor in itself. The meal in the condemned man’s dream is death.

— In dreams, metaphors are no longer word games, but direct constructions. They are something like a chair, a table, a wheel. Flying is swimming. This metaphor does not even belong to the realm of images. It means that if a man were to dream of flying, he would probably find himself moving his arms through the air as he does through water, because the closest thing to experiencing loss of gravity and total freedom of movement through space is the feeling of one’s body immersed in liquid. So flying is swimming. But even flying as jumping would work. Flying as sleeping, falling, hanging from something. Dreams can do even better, flying as a light. Then he will feel his body turn into heat and rise up like dust. The metaphor has become a compassion, feeling the same thing. This man in your experiment is no longer dreaming, he is awake, but now he is a calf. He senses the calf’s short, wiry hair on his own forehead, and in his nose feels big, black, slimy nostrils. Yes, now he is the Minotaur. This capacity to feel what one should not is common to all men, all of us experience it in hearing the detailed account of someone who has fallen, hurt himself. We sense his wounds in our own bodies, we feel his pain. Dreams can be seen as the most extreme form of poetic transformation. You were right, in this it is not far removed from imagination or delirium. The capacity to see fires and spirits, to be someone else for one long moment, to feel what another person feels. This was the oldest, simplest, truest rule for becoming a poet. The large white star that some horses have can be felt on your own forehead. On your face. You can feel the short, silky hair on your face, folding as you smooth your hand over it. The fresh scent of cut grass, think about that now, it will be in your nostrils if you have ever smelled it. Because it is not true at all that images in dreams do not cause pain, that they have no odour. Dreams are that world over there, made from all the semblances of this one, but assembled in a such a way that they are houses constantly swept through by the wind.

— You two-bit poet. — Now you’re the one who does not remember. The chest is empty, true, but inside it excludes something that does not yet exist. And so the emptiness is a place for something new. Those of

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us who meditated on it by imagining gold, treasures, herbs inside, did not really see the true nature of this basket. But those who simply found it empty did not understand much either. Those few people who instead imagined things yet unnamed, things yet to come, inseparable things, not yet dismembered: they alone truly meditated on the mystery. In the same way, some of the elements that take place in dreams cannot be named, but are purely emotional; even their meaning is constructed on this emotional basis and has all that additional value. These new elements are understood and accepted as being utterly stable and consistent with the state of things. Illogical rules are coherent to an altered consciousness. A child has chocolate hair and we eat his chocolate eyelashes, a little crystal bear sleeps between the pages of the book that we are paging through. Dreams, whatever form of will is guiding them, always seem to combine, configure and arrange these different materials and substances on an emotional basis. The process of creation does not proceed by addition, but by assembling elements whose new identity is immediately recognized. If they resemble junctures, it means that thought is a carpenter. Different figures are linked together, they fuse. In dreams, symbols are united, the seashells close and become active. They do not stay still, they move around. These assembled elements are present as precarious configurations. They have the semblance of belonging to the symbol, but are completely mobile. So a dream is also contingent. It is a horse, indeed, or a mule, that kicks and bucks against the conditions governing our lives. Dreams can be suggested by one’s own era. Again, dreams cannot be explained in terms of a single will but always through a multiplicity of independent agents.

— Dreams are always stories. These independent agents of yours know how to sit down around a table and write.

Some people had drifted away now, others had their backs turned or sat there tired, waiting for something that would spur them to go home. So it was as if the two of them were alone again. The calf’s head still between them, and the flies buzzing around it like flitting satellites. Sometimes, after wheeling around for a while, the flies would descend to settle on that dead thing. On its idiot eyes, around its nose, its forehead. They would rub their legs together carefully, smearing their heads with grease, then go back to circling through the air. Zzzzz zzzzz.

The pair called over a few urchins, promising some cheap treasure, sent them to overturn the crates of oranges that were sit-

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ting on a merchant’s stand. Red, orange, yellow. The boys staged a chase, a race, bumped into each others and against the crates and sent everything toppling. The crates tipped over. The oranges rolled through the air and the street, thomp thatathomp thatath-omp.

— In dreams as in life, everything that happens takes the form of a phrase. This double relationship is our world. For every situa-tion there is a sentence, for every action a verb, for every agent a noun.

— What do you want to do? Judge dreams according to grammat-ical criteria? There are no rules of construction. There is no such thing as a dream poorly dreamt. The events in a baby’s dream do not yet have names, there is no language that contains them, much less a story. Language separates, dismembers, discriminates, turns everything into a phrase, indeed, but in a dream we can sep-arate and discriminate only once we are freed from it upon wak-ing. Language wants to identify what the dream has kept mixed up. Thoughts spring from things and not from words. It is not true that language is the condition for thought. Look: when our own era is over, a new language will emerge, among people who will see these ruins of ours and feel their hearts burst. They will force our legacy of an epic word, this word made for warfare, and will say things about the sunset that we cannot even imagine. Yes, we can think in our language, but we cannot express our full thoughts without invention.

— You are the carpenter of chairs you cannot sit on and doors that refuse to open. Every story moves like these oranges. Without the gravity that gave this rolling a beginning and end, there cannot be a story. This is the syntax that also governs dreams. The gravity you hear me speak of, the master of this universal syntax of ours, has only one name. We all call it death.

Splash, thock, squish. The oranges now lay still where they had fallen, where they had rolled. In puddles, on the street, against a wall, under the stands down through the alleyways. Who knows, perhaps some were still rolling. Their owner cursed and shouted. He saw every citizen as a scoundrel, stealing them. Anybody could bend down and pick them up. Everyone could bend down, everyone was a thief. You wretches, don’t you dare bend your filthy knees! And then there were those little sons of bitches laughing at him somewhere over there. And that pair who had set

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up shop with their calf’s head and flies. Yes, they must also have something to do with his misfortune. Dirty dogs, the whole lot. The dog ambled by and he aimed a kick at it. Yip yip!

— No, we do not live to die. We saw that in our exploration of nothingness. Here or there, or even the hereafter, always indicate that something exists, that something is taking place. It doesn’t matter where. We've come back to what I was telling you. We are existences. We know nothing but this existing. Death is a bogey-man, an image, a mystery. If it is the master of some stories, that is only because we conceive of it as the end. And because we no longer know that we are like vapour, or like those apples. In other words, we have forgotten how things return.

— They return because they have no name. Apples are all apples. But what you said was right. We know about existence, so that is not what we are. That is no longer what we are. Existence now belongs to us, it is a possession. Look how much effort we put into fleeing any end to it. To overcome this horror there is nothing bet-ter than the masquerade of spectacle, where we can die again and again. Even dreams serve this pageant. How many men and women have dreams where they are in danger, hunted, threat-ened, on the brink of death? But fleeing from the end is simply our greatest source of delight. A pleasure, you see? Because only the end helps us bear the journey. How could we bear life, otherwise, if we didn’t know that one day it will finally be over? Yes, we live to die.

They seemed to be smiling. They gave, so to speak, that impression of calm satiety one finds in all satisfied creatures, after a long meal, or when their thirst is finally slaked. Something at long last had made them capable of recognizing their difference.

— What does this calf’s head demonstrate by itself? It can tell us nothing about the Minotaur. We used language to make light of the justified doubts raised by these merchants’ sons. But they asked a question that we have not yet answered. We have once again forgotten the Minotaur’s body in the labyrinth. We have taken a brain and tongue and asked questions which these objects cannot answer on their own. We are looking at this brain as the privileged seat of our knowledge. Its pallor has seduced us. This calf’s head of yours tells us nothing, not because it cannot speak, but because a head, a brain, is nothing without the rest of the body. Herein lies our mistake: trying to raise up symbols without the strength of arms, trying to speak a language without a slimy tongue, or teeth, or breath. Listen, in dreams as in the waking

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world, we are the ones who do something in a given situation. What we call being human is linked to our experience in the world. If dreams are always stories, then it is because their construction is determined by this relationship. It unfolds in relation to the world through our existence as a body. Even our concepts are a physical experience. Without this gravity, without this existence in the world as a body, we could not even understand each other on the subject of how to grow tomatoes. No one could teach us how to kiss, how to move a tongue inside a mouth. Speech, being able to say something, the event of language, is not necessarily a will to say. It would seem instead to be a will to do. Perhaps in this light we could go back to your question on the orator. Putting a fact before someone’s eyes through conversation, pointing out an invisible object and making it palpable means doing something, not just saying it. This particle of death found in language, which is the here or the there, is a sort of “Here it is”, the projection of an image on the plane of reality. A saying that is doing. Language, in its most direct form, is an action. Without constant participation and perception of the world there is no motive for an agent.

— Music is the only force that drives us. When you will say some-thing whose music we all recognize, then that thing will come back to us again and again. But man cannot know everything he says. We need rhythm to be able to say something new.

— Yes, even a poet follows the music of his own tongue. He looks for one melody among many, one that he can trust. Music without the sound of language, if it is not in tune with thought, can lead us astray. There are tra-la-las and ta-ta-tatas that can turn you upside down. There was once a poor man whom everyone thought to be wise. He stumbled across a you have to look down to see up. And soon found himself wallowing in his cheap music. You have to look round to see straight. You have to go slow to catch up, eat to get thin, fast to grow fat, lose to win, tara-tara-tata, tara-tara-ta, there’s good in every ill, destroy to create1.

— You aren’t listening to me. A man puts his head in a tub of water, and in that darkness sees nothing but his own reflection, his own eyes. Anything that is said in there will be said by him, anything that is thought will be thought by him. The tank will warp his eyes, his voice, his thoughts. Everything will be an echo and everything will be dark. Dreams are this man’s monologue.

— We could beat the tub or drown him in it.

The danger, as they had told each other more than once, was not in digression, but in starting to believe exactly what was said.

₁William H. Gass, Omensetter’s Luck, 1966.


Something could arrive and strike them. Then they would have to turn their thoughts against it, cut out their tongues, kill them-selves or be enslaved by it. Their greatest fear was of remaining loyal to an idea. It would mean projecting themselves into a dark future, towards dark responsibilities. Because in the end, that idea could be true or not be there at all.

— Will to say or will to do. Everything is just a will. No saying and no doing. So are we this will without an object? This desire with no desire? I could and should denounce you in the public square. Here and now, have you arrested. Killed. Hunt down everyone with whom you have spoken. Kill them too and then necessarily take my own life. Why? What good would it do? The error of each individual will lead us back to that horizon that we feared so much before. The sun is going down, the market is closing.

Later on they encountered a funeral procession. Long, black, mournful. Preceded by the sound of stifled sobs. The corpse was small and thin. It was followed by a pale, crying woman who would fall to her knees in the other women’s arms, then get back up, then collapse again. And thus she went on wailing in despair. They followed the funeral for a while shouting after it, with lewd quips, gutter humour, dirty stories and jokes until the woman, as she fell once more to her knees, burst out laughing. And so she bared her white teeth and red gums, and laughed at her daughter’s funeral.

Documents

When the hunter is resting does the hare stop leaving tracks, Alex Cecchetti