The short stubbles of his scruffy goatee blended like a brightly colored motion of a pointillist painting into the detailed foam of ginger waves and the freckled splashes of his reddish face under an orange sky lit by a spiky haircut. His light blue eyes looked gloomy.
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Faces (52)
The tip of her nose was powdered thickly, round like a ripe plumb. She owned a pair of glazing, dark brown eyes, circumligned by a crisp, black border, like burnt pits hanging from a tree, above her pointy, white chin, cleaved by the sharp, blazingly red stripes of her thin lips.
Faces (51)
With a pair of black, fleece ear warmers clipped onto his ears, closely fitting around his small head, his shiny, black haired skull topped by a wool, camel, flat cap, his large, falling nose mounted by metal rimmed, aviator glasses and his face colored by a dark brown, Indian tan, and the collar of his winter jacket pulled up high around his neck against the icy cold, the man appeared diminished to a suppressed, reprieved expression.
The Girl in the Window (2): Black Silhouette of the Past
Her deep, black silhouette is tightly pressed against the whitened window’s glass. Her opened mouth astonishing and astonished at the same time, her eyes are absorbed by the blinding light that sheds through the panes. I stand behind her in the dream, behind her curved back as she turns in a flash toward the garden, away from me. I can’t see what she sees, a figure. Is this when I lose her? Is this when that she is losing something, is this a memory of her childhood? In the instant, she wants to run after the figure in the garden, chase it, but she is locked in by the walls, the windows, the glass, the frames, she stands still and instead only her eyes follow the man out of the garden, opening the gate, closing the gate again. I want to pull her back toward me but I sit at the kitchen table behind her and cannot reach her fragile body, that I want to cherish, retain, regain, possess, I want to enclose her in my stretched out arms that form an empty embrace, but she is out of my reach. I feel sad, I want to cry, but I have lost the reaction to sadness, and just stare at her beautiful, lost, black body, mourning. A continent away in time, the same dream, forward in time, the same room, the same kitchen table, my same stationary point of view in the girl’s life. I don’t see the coal black silhouette anymore, not the large lips, the curved eyebrows running like crescent lines around the waxing, tiny eyes, instead, a brightly lit, brown face on the other side of the window. Her face stained by the dusty window, her mouth covered by one of the white window bars, I can only see her longing eyes, her African nose, her Afro hair that fits her like a hat. Her face is framed near the door handle, in the pane below her flat, girlish body wearing a black sweater, but her arms hang silently besides her slim body, she stares at me, I cannot read her thoughts. Does she long for me to embrace her perhaps, does she not comprehend why I still sit at the kitchen table? I feel immense sadness again, I wish to hold her, kiss her, to comfort myself perhaps, I search for lips, but they are invisible, out of sight, untouchable.
The Big Bang of Self
“Everything living dies of internal reasons,” Artaud thought. It is the law of being which states that all matter, organic or not, has no presence to the other except as an outer, remote appearance. This appearance was but a coincidental appearance, which was incapable to revert itself to the deliberate action of essence. Sartre had stated something along similar lines, he remembered, but of course, to Sartre the essence had been the self, and the appearance had been the impossibility of love. Death was the negation of the subject of the other, turning the other into a state of object. It was not enough therefore that dark matter constituted only eighty percent of the matter in the universe, according to estimates. It was obvious in Artaud’s understanding that the universe itself was only a representation of the self and that this, true to its nature, was fully unknown. The dark matter of the universe together with ordinary matter did not even exist. The Big Bang had come into being by the immaculate conception of theoretical physics, but this ontological myth had as little to do with science as the religious myth of Creation. God created life, but as Artaud believed, the I was destined to die. Artaud concluded therefore that perhaps a lot of things didn’t make much sense, or at least not right now, but as soon as he would unravel the mystery of death, the last missing chapter in his Theory of Life, the pieces of the puzzle would automatically fall together.
The Girl in the Window (1)
I watched the heavy lump of male flesh sink rhythmically into the nest formed by the two slim legs, hanging somewhere in mid air without grace, of the girl with black hair laying on her back. She was being fucked without lust, his body rising again from her clinches but too heavy to free itself from his own gravity that weighed on her, trapping her in the mattress. She moved into another position only at the silent gesture of his hands pushing her sidewards or upwards, without portraying any sense for pornographic beauty or luscious will. I stared nevertheless obsessively at these two slowly fucking white torsos, maybe as much captured by their lack of desire as bythe beastly attraction of their movements. Their act of pairing visualized a necessity. I saw no passion, no madness, just two human bodies clumsily caught up in an attempt to shake off their loneliness, their movements desperately failing to escape their human fates. I saw the fat on the man’s waist shake like a distant gel and felt disgust and pity. The girl’s arms lay folded helplessly above her head, and I wanted to grab her hands and pull her out of her trap. When I looked again, their tired bodies lay along each other, in a parallel harmony, his hand caressing her, like unexperienced children denying the violent clash of lovers. His hand glided from her shoulder to her waist, over her thigh, as if to comfort her. I felt utter boredom and jerked myself off watching them.
Les Pensées
Artaud felt how the drizzle absorbed the mass of his body, the space of the city, and believed that he would soon dissolve, or was it Artaud who absorbed the drizzle, the city, the space, the mass, like millions of other bodies that wandered through the city without aim.
Rivers of the Underground: Phlegethon
The fire of my loins, flowing around my torso like lava, erupted from the mount Etna, spitting ashes in stone formations that sprout through the air, like the mountain being a giant whale ploughing its majestic grand body through the waves of the terrain, pouring open the wounds of evil, that live in my heart, of the cruelty that shoved in people’s throats, like the sharpened pole’s end of rupture and ego, penetrating their rectum, constituting the horrific rape of Lucrece, a crime that will not heal, but bleed here hundreds of yards beneath the plain’s surface of goodness and kindness, of compassion, of humanity, like flames licking my beard, that smells of sulphur, the passion that once fueled my madness, now aflame, and like Tantalus bending down desperately to put out that bursting heat, my thirst increases, my hunger grows, alas, why were thou Lolita of my heart, so young and luscious, to cut my head like Judith, the beak of a snake, now in your hand, that pulls me down this stream of fire. Did I not repent? To boil my soul in blood unto the end of times, is this the wage for loving you, this your justice. My crime to love you, to lust for the blood of your womb, to quench my violent passion to possess you, all born from love. Here now is my meal, the plate of man’s hunger, for the flesh to ravishly possess, to penetrate the shield of other men with my spear, to kill the impossible and to take you. Now you speak, young maiden, where lies the crime in that?
You know it’s a Fantasy, don’t you?
Les Pensées
A yellowish blue colored the nightly sky above the high rising facades that formed the immensity of the city. Artaud lay in his bed and pulled the blanket over his shoulder and fell asleep unaware of the millions of lives that surrounded his lifeless body.