Tease of Weave

Time lies in wait. Our river's valley is a custom and a comfort; afterwards, the balconies and doorways of a principal avenue, a sudden snake, appear among the stage-stuff.


The kingdom clamours for pitch. The northern american states call for pitch. They will have it. A sticky harvest, first in pools between roots, then tubs in carts, then traincars. Our ladder is of  one carved stem, rungs as a row of bracts.


I become occupied by the fashions of ferns. Some knit thick lobes, persist in ice; an old commerce of flesh. Others evolve their lace til frost: a teased weave.


Devices complicate the walls of the dining room. This interior is a fruiting tree; this palace is a garden. Foliage intervenes, nourishes; the branches droop. Apples. Our eyes covet them first.

Journal: In the city today, the oración as though unwound, unravelled, and become a diffuse mass, following my steps, ricocheting off apartment blocks, gathering around as I walk away from the unseen source, the paradoxical effect of ascending; a quality of quantitative change completely different from a twist of the volume-knob, because contingent on my movement. A woman in purple religious cloth singing, doubling it, as she carried a bucket of water. I seek some way to treat with these metaphors beyond noting that they betoken monotheism. The voice fully entered into their texture, a vantage-point for this unrolling of the mat anywhere, spiritual exercise of public time-architecture, rather than the monumentality up north.

Walter Benjamin (traduit C. Jouanlanne): Petite conversation le soir auprès d'un feu de chiminée avec Speyer. Comme je regardais la flamme lécher les bûches et que nous étions en train de parler d'un roman, ces deux objets de ma méditation se sont fondus en un seul. Il m'a semblé tout à coup que l'empiliment des morceaux de bois représentait le veritable modèle de la composition dans les romans : l'action doit elle aussi laisser du jeu, être elle aussi entièrement conçue pour être dévorée, être elle aussi tout à fait à l'opposé de toute construction archetecturale et, à plus forte raison, monumentale.

It is effective to think of zillij as the harvest of a doctrinal limitation

I passed the triple fountain on my way up, obliviously, as it is silently dry and enfolded within a knight's move of the walls. I visited the terrace of a friable palace, that volunteered its pool for the benefit of my comprehension of the fountain - the old, unholy water being  thick  and  rife  with truck. On the way back I was brought to a halt when I saw the mosaics through the doorway, a density we are seldom given to know, filling the frame, a local reality operating without friction, a perfect device without maintenance or issue, save the exactly perceived spectacle of its work. Thought thinking itself; pure consciousness; intricate accident.

I pass wells coiffed in wrought-iron equipments, and wells that begin in obscure gutters, their portals prudently hatched, and roads that one refers to with syllables of wells, and villages named after the same. Et la-bas un lavoir s'étale, se pousse; grotto within, where swim the sirens of women doing the laundry. They occupied a small farm whose colombier alone attested to their nobility: a citadel lost in the boxwoods, hatched expanse of pigeon-holes, ladder helix, mobile on spiked axis: a sort of apse that has lost the body of its christ. Wiser and happier than I, they have remained in sight of the towers of the chateau I left thirty years ago. I pass windmills: there, yonder in ruins on colline among fertile ashy clods; there, next to the road, freshly and hopefully rigged and roofed, lacking sails but furnished with all necessary hooks, resting lightly in the faery-ring of its rotation.

They are children. Their gills
grant them,
who vary, and mildly ply,
ways
among people-steeples,
decorated, symbolic, brick,
cult of figures or
cultivation of levels,
bells and bells
speaking a flock that grace dismantles
at dusk, in apt gloom, perhaps.

Among such they work
questions.

I was seeking cathedrals in those days

I was seeking ruins in those days. The matters must be precarious, and falling. I found a moorish donjon within a hash of walls, later a lone avant-bec in mid-stream; but ghosts in carriages, coaches, cars hazed them, by means of illumination, and made vistas. I left by bicycle; more carriages, coaches, cars passed, until, far behind and susceptible, I became aware of bells communicating within a flock, and thereafter was among them - sheep - who, reluctantly, breaking into faster paces, swarmed about me. We had met on the valley road.

The keep had been massively foursquare, as wide and deep as high, top as thick as flanks, a kind of wall and tower at once. "The palpable mysteries of stylistic difference in war-making matter" - I muttered mi-voix - "setting aside possible practical advantages, must themselves have had an instrumental value in making war."

On the other hand. The bridge-but, shouldering the stems of its arches. As I was looking at it a sandpiper flew behind and then perched, lightly, on the ruffling mid-flood; I blinked, as they do in books, and realized that a section of fallen arc must there nearly break the brilliantly deceptive water.

Around our ruins the dance is dense.

The shepherd, when I met him, was dressed in corduroys and dark wool, and carried a long, light stick. We saluted as I passed. The bells, his bells, propagated a second, audible, valley and nested it within the first, visible, one.