prendre une pose c'est pendre une prose

There is no God. I am well placed to testify.

the first phrase Vassilis Alexakis wrote in French,
intended as the epitaph for his own tomb

my addressbook pullulates with names that have fallen silent

to have several tongues in one's mouth might give one the upper hand in combat, having such weapons at one's disposal. this strength is in fact a weakness. reduction to mutism by the impossibility of choice.

to each tongue the world tastes differently. not a question of translation as of astonishment. the entire effort of writing can be resumed in a kiss, mingling of multilingual saliva.

writing like travel might give impression of multiple personalities by slight changes of voice and idiom. the opposite is true: the same world utterly transformed when spoken in another tongue.

language speaks a world. to speak a language means undergoing a tectonic shift.

a spider has set up watch in the corner of my window, despite the snow storm. thick flakes alight on the screen as fat flies. watch the blizzard insects swarm, rich night hunt.

rainbow: among the phenomena that never figure in weather forecasts

word watch:

jokulhlaup: glacial outburst flood that may occurs in regions of the world where mountaintop glaciers sit on top of volcanic regions (source: With Glaciers Atop Volcanoes, Iceland Zooms In on Signs of Unrest, New York Times, Jan 17, 2006)

Within hardly more than a month, two inmates have been executed in California: Stanley Tookie Williams (51) on December 13, and, today, Clarence Ray Allen (76). Executions in the state of California take place at night. Stanley Williams received a lethal injection one minute pas midnight, and died 31 (thirty one) minutes later, while Clarene R. Allen was put to death at 12:38 am. There seems to be an unconscious admission of the horror of the capital punishment--as if it there were no precendent for laws sheltering terror--in the refusal to "administer death", like a cure, during regular business hours. The executioner's labor, in the public spectacle of the guillotine or of the gallows, was performed with less hypocrisy.

Twice, the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose title film roles now gain a new significance, refused clemency. "Based on the cumulative weight of the evidence, there is no reason to second-guess the jury's decision of guilt or raise significant doubts or serious reservations about Williams' convictions and death sentence," Schwarzenegger explained.

Family members of the girl murdered by Allen spoke of "prevailing justice".

It is hard to demand of victims to protect its own executioners... and yet... their humanity is here at stake.

To speak of "death penalty" is to bypass at least one question: can death be considered a penalty? The answer goes beyond the impossibile conscioussness of such a punishment.

A question of life and death is an absolute question, and exceeds the equivalence of crime and punishment guaranted by law. Killing a man for a theft is the same as killing him for a murder. The evidence of the criminal's guilt or the magnitude of the victims' suffering ceases to have place here.

Death penalty is perhaps also the most facile. Its excess seems to exonerate the system of law from thinking of the individual, from elaborating a structure of reflexivity that might allow the criminal to experience the gravity of his own crime.

The governor's bureaucratic gesture is symptomatic of a turning away from any questioning: the signature of refusal slices the world into two opposing parts along an imaginary "axis of evil," and pretends to protect one part by simply eliminating the other.

Explication des Poids
et des Mesures

*

La pinte est de deux livres.
La livre est de seize onces.
L'once est de huit gros.
Le gros est de trois scrupules,

ou soixante-douze grains.

Le grain équivaut à un grain

d'orge.

from Petit Dictionnaire Portatif de Santé (1790) par M.L*** et M. de B***, Paris: GLM avril 1954

Jan Novak's new and yet unfinished documentary, Citizen Vaclav Havel Goes on Vacation, has just been screened at Northwestern University. In the summer of 1986, Vaclav Havel, always under the surveillance of secret services, decides to see whether travel for recreation is still possible for him in the Czechoslovak Republic. Following Vaclav Havel's own silver-colored Volkswagen Golf, ADC-77-13, now owned by a friend, and 1980s police Tatra cars, the film retraces the journey, revisiting the places where the playwright dissident had stayed, and interviewing the surviving friends. The footage is interspaced with 19:30 TV news, traditionally featuring comments on this year's grain harvest, rejoicing over a new factory footbridge, deploring the rain that fell down the barley. The familiar news with its "live" coverage and interchangeable timelines.

The documentary maintains the same distance to its subject as did an average citizen of the Communist block to the daily nuisance of undercover agents eavesdropping on conversations, 48-hour arrests, or chronic lack of products in the stores. Inhabitants of the other side of the iron curtain readily recognize that theater of absurd played out with the minimum of variation. The inept policemen conducting sometimes brutal searches of the house, foraging and plundering, and being duped by wit or by sheer chance. The film includes an interview with a policeman, who used to stalk Havel's summer house and who, on the eave, had no inkling of the coming revolution.

There are graver notes, recalling the cruelty of the 1950s regime, the ruthless Stalinism when, as Jan Novak pointed out in the discussion after the screening, "one put one's life on the line, and just one's existence."

The film resuscitates memory. First, Vaclav Havel's own recollection of that summer, one among other, since then overshadowed by events of greater import. The very normality of the trip, in the company of not-so-secret agents, stands out today perhaps more than documents of a revolution: as quotidian against quotidian beyond synonymy. The uneventfulness of this summer vacation turns it into the memory of anyone's summer: for, anyone's summer could, at any moment, be always interrupted. This document plays with and questions contexts: the president becomes a citizen among others--and the title of the movie brings to mind Vojak Svejk--; the daily news that ponctuate the reconstructed trip, today, seem pictures of another planet, like Gagarin in his cosmonaut's suit in the news' opening sequence, like uniform youths performing synchronic exercises in front of Husak, Jakes, and the whole myopic clique. The historic context of Charter 77, of the Velvet Revolution is moved to the background. Here, it is rather the memory of the police search for a document openly lying on the table and of an encounter with a police pawn after the coup.

Jan Novak's documentary accomplishes not a small thing: it places the viewer, regardless of his origin or age, in the context of the Communist everyday, and allows him to experience the commonplace absurdity of the age of terror. Also, a question for today: aren't we too serious?

in my dream, the little girl kneeling on the bed wears an aureole over her head. now she has moved and i see it's only a paper lampshade without a bulb, shaped as a saturn's ring.

sometimes, to defer the reading of a book or a letter the way little Marcel might have liked to postpone the moment of his mother's kiss

... ne te noie pas dans les eau vides ...

... fidèle, il se méfie d'elle ...

... a może wysnujesz się z tej mgły, wlekąc się sennie, jakby wzdłuż obłąkanego wybrzeża, zsuniesz sobie wełnianą czapkę na oczy, aby cię nikt nie rozpoznał, ślady w kurzu zostawisz tylko dla zmylenia, a potem, wtulony w piasek i szlam rzeczny, uśniesz, zakluczając pod powiekami gruzy świata...

dans un rêve, je suis devant une bibliothèque contenant des volumes très anciens et poussiéreux. être ici, dans cet endroit, c'est comme dans l'oeil de l'ouragan. j'attends. je prends dans les mains un de ces livres, plus haut que large, et je me rends compte qu'il est rongé des vers. au moment même où je l'ouvre, il s'écroule, et un fourmillement de la vermine blanche, minuscule et épaisse comme la poussière, s'éparpille entre mes doigts. j'ai tant eu le désir de le lire!

le sonnet, c'est un petit carillon

... la femme without me, l'homme without home ...

... savage like birds of prayer ...

the errancy of syntax in our economy, under the guise of sin tax imposed on cigarettes, marks the margins of a grammar of ineptness

a mouse burrowed its path into my home. the holes were patched with steel wool and silicon before it found its way back.

how does one define a poetic event?

what follows is an anxious night of overhearing, that is, a state in which the ear is under siege.

home is what we expect to stand still. this lack of movement implies a certain timelessness, perhaps a hermetic enclosure as of a jar of preserves. a sudden intrusion, of a rodent, less so than of an insect that wandered here by mistake, its path oblivious of my dwelling, disturbs the setting and, by setting something in motion, upsets the reliance on linear passage of time.

in a meadow, i might have emptied a husk of wheat and offered its grains to a gray field mouse.

there are animals that don't take possession of their territory.

a friend writes me of a man who threw a live mouse into a bonfire. the mouse escaped and, aflame, ran back into the house. the house burnt down.

fear is a loss of proportions. i recognize, in slight gestures of panic, germs of so-called counterattacks, admitting a comfort in the impermeability of what i call home and which also designates a well-aimed target.

dans mon rêve, c'est le lac qui lance les galets. le front en saigne sur le sable, et la bicyclette en est déjà rouillée.

il y a un animal qui habite dans mon four. je sais que ceci n'est qu'un rêve. en me réveillant, je l'entends piétiner sur la grille d'acier. il est impossible d'allumer le four bien qu'il fait si froid.

qu'as-tu dans la bouche?

... mais l'anglais, cela n'a pas d'angles, cette langue en glaise, n'as-tu pas peur qu'elle ne devienne une langue en bois dans ta bouche, ne s'effiloche en échardes, que tu va boire trempées dans ta salive polonaise?