The Words Start:
An Autobiography

Read:                     A. With a smile, she saw nobody too vain to make people people finally forgot. It was not so much transparent veils on top of the wardrobe, but all the formal opposition. I love if no one else does. God is here! My mother and I asked for light, watch-chain strung across grandfather’s halo. Late afternoon, body erect, arms open, I would go hurtling against his breath. What if I make peepee in holy-water? All the more precious to be in danger. What can be more simple?                     B. I spring forward, egalitarian smile. He was surely right, knew he was. They were cutting his throat. From statue-like face bewildered, sentences emerged, swarmed with syllables. I felt myself becoming extra-lucid, mother of all reading. After awhile I took me out of myself. I put back those hard black words, humus, a lean universe. My moods threw me into states which escaped me, afraid of wandering venomous meanings richer than I realized. I reported the facts, but to what delirium I remained a child? I was careful for knowledge, liked to please, and I would recharge myself absentmindedly and turn pages as prayer mills. I had not understood what had not affected me. Turning to my solitude, wooden desk with bench, there lurked that sick criminal inscription, my politeness, my respect. My voice began to whirl.                     C. How could I have taken myself into their intentions, their needs, hopes, pleasures, my self coldly separated from proud exile? I suddenly felt ashamed of that well- ordered world, Father making his moods my law. I was my father’s work, condemned beyond impenetrability. I’m a dog. I yawn. I’m a tree wind shakes vaguely. I fall, start climbing the caress of time as it goes -- I feel it engulf, never think flesh thoughts. God would have managed a signed masterpiece. That was more than I dared recognize in the fashionable. By combined twists and pluck, I was vitriolizing myself in smiles. The remedy was shelter against truth. My own momentum seems clear, only one unjustified hatred that caressed and coddled. I plunged into words, into generosity, a secret balm that ends by poisoning.                     D. I made a false entrance; I began my birth again. Without a name I walk, an unconscious screaming below. I put her arms around my neck, cross out everything for the sublime. Universal order. What joy. I found the world in which I was absolute, decided to wait for blows without hitting back, feigning cowardice, my blazing and mortal future. At twilight I would be back where spirit blew, where things weren’t going right. I was saved by meaning.                   Writ                     A. When two women sent off tears, the girl didn’t give a damn about the genius I dug up. But I had got a start. Taking her eyes I would sometimes answer: real walls, bright but all in vain. To join things up, less plagiarizing, I threw the imaginary. The young fought the sharks, the sea red, the desert with guts sewn up under the name of rule. As a hero, I became a harmless tyrant myself. The next day I would launch my characters unfinished. With my first hall of mirrors, “I” knew joy. It was too good to last. By virtue of my domestic steadiness, the craft of adult activity, so ponderous at bottom, so lacking in moment, disenchantment turned me inside thought -- I was going down my imaginary passions, their sole function to provide me age while I awaited maturity.                     B. A white cloth, sparkling wine; I took a glass, drank a toast to my health; bare, dusty vastness expected nothing more. We would continue dialogue, each word deft little strokes. I almost gave up the gist, unwise to deny it entirely, unable to legitimize that self. My illusion was that one is born into the world with expectation. I chewed at my innocence with the soul of a set fire. Docile by custom, I pulled my own bootstraps, sickening dullness, peace of mind an unpleasant encounter. Certain ideas, assigned to a body, mankind in hand, the wild beasts of full leisure kill each truthless existence. Animality required the relics of statues be preserved in at least one living future. Filthy twaddle: I gulped it standing.                     C. My ambitions advance, thwarted to depict pleasure. My bones are made of flesh smells. I liked them enough but to no avail. One never knows who’s alive, silent, jealous, in exile, annoyed in advance. You cold? I would throw humility blinding awareness. You never felt that time was short? Do you answer partly in defiance? Full of blood, deprive death of its goal, life going quietly. It was not entirely my mirage: When death ceases forever to be a character, the time of baptism, the time of extreme unction, has exploded. No further risks of unfolding, a bit of life to it, relapses. His passions, his blunders, his acts of resistance, the light of information as the truth of reconstruction. Short narratives, the very ordinary but sensitive poison, constantly inserting allusions, contriving impossible tumult. He threw his sob over their heads.                     D. Pure forgotten masterpiece, I strutted past their eyes, my own obituary. After reading me anxiously, short of beginning, when it came to bluff, my trick, my insincerity, was constantly grazing, but that was enough for me. If someone had crept open to all the winds, he busts a stray multiplication, a rose call, some historical maxims engraved on stiles, mist hovering this sad single female orphan. The words hero, martyr, not repeated by any average intelligence, exact sciences on the wane -- I detested these newcomers in jungle. Gift of self became everyday reduced to collective mists, the one big sun. That epic of mediocrity took refuge in the past, love-stained and dog-eared ruins. I would forever be left king of victims, all the more ecstasy and delight. Brown fences or frail cubical dried blood, a puritanical crime and virtue, the righter of wrongs.                     E. In public, a wink would be enough. To share our amazement, we became friends with his satanic likeness too late to take this for its own sake. Virtue had led actual fact, all but withered in concealment. Momentary paralysis, obsessed by this praise for offering blame, for having only reasoned distrust. It brought the following state of extreme emergency: everything absorbed me. Slipping away with a shudder, an arrow pierced time. I looked with curiosity off the lake, those wavy wastes my prow was cleaving. For me, speed is distance covered in a given rooting. Eager to prove worthy of something better, I saw my posthumous victory. To feel the slow development of my stuffed soul, I subordinated the past to the future, transformed a revolutionary state of crisis, became a traitor and threw myself heart and soul.                     F. I’ll repudiate myself. I fled love. My whole output provided hierarchy, only one masterpiece. Yesterday I was blind; today I’ve stopped progressing. I look much the better out of pure chance. The voices gathered together already dead, the dismal sun of glory, its trajectory crashing into the womb. Nevertheless, I myself added to the collapse. The prediction would dry a carcass. The woeful little pretender, from chair to chair, turns them aside. It’s time nothing will come of, this cloudy future in stagnant sensations. Good God, only being in all creation, open at random, a book so sad. Far off, swinging from a branch, I wanted to save myself to reveal the rustling of words. I claim my old dreams the unknown still inhabits and I don’t believe in God.