GHERASIM LUCA ___________________________ TWO PROSE PIECES Translated by Julian Semilian

The Volcanoes Inside Vegetables

A canoe made of hair, it seems to me, with soft paddles, gelatinous, like sea animals, beneath which a woman, entirely of crystal, rolls a ball from one lip to the other, is the image-archetype of pollution. During one of my pollutical nights, unhappily so rare, when the poplars lining up before my domicile adopted a compulsively fastidious aspect in their evening frocks, and the violins in my gestures assumed a discreet sound like torture instruments, my imposingly dauntless position regarding erotica seemed to me a disquieting distortion of metallic facial wrinkles on a metal face affixed on a body that accents only its rigid and osseous sections, neglecting the passive-voluptuous subtlety and incertitude of its weft, its lungs, the predilection accorded the scheleton in our current amorous life replacing for me in a demoralizing manner the popular image of death. I don't know to what measure the castration complex can be introduced into an enterprise, be it nostalgic and partial like this one, where the impeachment of a massive activity on the erotic plane is tested. I understand that sado-mosochistic game-playing transforms much of the schematic aspect under which I expound these matters, but what I wish to affirm essentially is that the male and its fabricated rigidity fills the eye that observes it from without with nausea. I am disgusted by the cuddly violence of the male and to this disgust can be granted with more authority than at any other time a certain objectivity because the unpleasant sentiment that I am subjected to finds me inside the phenomenon, myself personally occupying in the realm of the amorous a lightly sadistic position. The disdain towards the easy histrionics that accompany practically every time this ilk of active enterprise where sadism is not put into effect to its morbid or extreme degree, but is sustained within its general, theatrical contour, its gesticulations taking on an artificial path, causes me to envy the essentially apparent passivity of the female, because I find it more spontaneous in its reactions, more revealing, more vibrant. I am aware of the risk

taken in terms of the consequences in the realm of the analytic which affirmations such as these may provoke and I believe I may lighten up the work-load of the eventual analyst if I were to remind him of the extensive masturbational exercises to which the author of these lines dedicated himself during his adolescence, exercises which still, from time to time, hold him in their allure like the scene of the crime the criminal. I confess though that my analytic file holds little interest for me because my personal position inside of a complex cannot exhaust the conclusions of a general character provoked by the examination of this erotic spectacle where one of the actors is vested in a rigid mantle of bones while the other is a nerve severed with a saw. For in order that the male's bones crack, in order that the marrow within them to spill out like veritable lava, they would need to be endowed with the nebulous and satanic consistency of a Marquis de Sade. It seems to me that it is not necessary to take passivity to its ultimate limit in order for it to become entirely sensitized. I see myself at the roots of a tree taken by surprise by a woman in a red T-shirt glued to her skin, with long black hair strewn in disarray over her shoulders, with eyes like burnt brush. The caresses or the bites of this woman are just as voluptuous to me, the element of surprise containing in its fulgurance a state of panicarousal, capable of transcending any previous commonplace state. This horrific woman, if she is not sadistic to the extreme, if she is not lost to my sight to awaken the next day in a distant forest next to my cadaver, with her hands stained with blood, is frustrated in her pitch of frequency, in her howl of ash. I place my lips upon the eyes of this incomplete and minor image of passivity, the flowers, with hesitant butterflies swarming around them like vultures. In my bedsheets with drawn curtains, the circles around the eyes that I touch are silent electrical doorbells. The pores are at hand, I am a rubber ball, the hair is far above the head, my eyes tongue the mouth of this unborn woman. A tree on my forehead, transparent and somewhat sparrow, its leaves dropping loose throughout the room, o! what an odd spring. A thick smoke suffuses my arm and thin trails as from a cigarette exude from my fingers with their nails surprisingly stained in a promiscuous yellow. With these stained fingers I leaf through a papyrus, an apricot. Nights fall too quickly in my house for dawn to ever break. The rains within are quick, walls sway, weeds and canoes float upon my lips, perhaps they are my words. My words bite your thighs, it is as though my teeth were written. It is a delirious calligraphy, to be studied today by tomorrow's graphology inside pyramids under an immense block of ice growing in the middle of the desert like a miracle. The mysterious calligraphy of illiterates where images seem closer to the objects which have not been invented yet, the simulated calligraphy of illiterates. I open you up like a horse and look inside for the bridle bit, forgetting you already hold it between your teeth. Night falls again, it is night incessantly. It is the witching hour, permanently bewitching, where the consistency of your being is far more certain than flesh, your bewitching flesh, permanently bewitching. I caress your ectoplasm like I would a shark. I sip you from tall beakers of crystal propped up on living frog leg. I invite you, I shout you, I bestow a name on you, any name. Fog, hair, a mask of quicksilver over your eyes, the vegetables from our virtual gestures, the tiger sleeping on our voice and the salutation we perform reciprocally for one another from the

window, lifting from our shoulders with two fingers our craniums like a hat while the trains transporting us in two opposite directions crash into one another like a snowflake.

Mineral O! Statue of Desire

I stroll along a rampart clutching under my arm a length of fog from which the abdomen of a woman, the lips of a woman on the abdomen of this woman are glued to the brumal forehead of a thinker from the past century pierced in succession by a saber, a fulguration, a flock, a cosmos of birds. This rampart, I don't know by what sort of miracle appositioned parallel to the ocean, I don't know by what sort of game of chance irrupting out of me and crashing against the vast ground swell hailing from far away, chaperones my strolls spawning the suspicion that I am in the midst of a city that has been recently excavated, perhaps a city at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps a city inside a porpoise. The hat on my head is purposefully outmoded, I sport a roaming astral retina, a threadlike mouth under a sumptuous mustache, exclusively enshrouded in velvet, my simultaneous approach to this rampart in ruins and to the ocean provoking me to suddenly secrete a bale of lachrymal salt. I nurse an impalpable lament as in a slumber where too many offerings are being sacrificed to you at once, the lachrymal salt trickles down my face in order to complete this landscape veritably oneiric where I prefer to remain permanently awake. My limbs are now spider silk and the sand beneath them does not even retain the tracks of my soles lightweight as respiration. It is more like a murmur, my stroll, a zephyr. In turn my cranium leaves behind it visible tracks and once home how exuberantly do I follow through a crack in the window the succession of craniums extending out into the remote and leashing the ocean to me. Yesterday I abandoned my home forever but not before I, before the tall bedroom mirror, put on a top hat of incessant vertigo simply for the satisfaction of subsequently spying on the incessant succession of top hats tumbling into the surf. Have I disposed of myself? I doubt it, once I have opted for this leisurely

mode of disposal labeled life I can't conceive why my existence should have concluded yesterday. But perhaps my life is one thing while what came to pass surpasses what is surmised by the antinomy of life and death. I am entirely ridiculous. I should paint a sparrow on my face and hook to my buttonhole the map of a country from the history books. Progressively more ridiculous. I twist on the faucet in the bathtub, (yes, I do have a bathtub!), I shut the window, I eat a plum, I stare in the mirror, I organize my mustache. The mustache once again? How many more times do I need to bite out of this fruit populated by worms in order to be able to taste what has been labeled life's experience, in order to be no longer bewitched by the charm of its cadaveric putrefaction? The decadence of each gesture I execute like a death sentence and the aura that surrounds my head each time I think about corpses, about wax figures, about ruins, manuscripts half devastated by arson, about a spoon between the fingers of a woman putrefying leisurely on its journey to the mouth, about movements captured in slowmotion in old movies, but preeminently about mustaches, the mustaches of men at the turn of the century, provoke me to peruse the things that surround me with a retina that presupposes itself perused, with a retina of stone pursued by a stone of flesh and, impervious to how minuscule and how relative this casually passive and easy to violate position might be, I can't deprive myself of its morbid charm. I would prefer to posses the philosopher's stone in order to transmute lead to gold. I would prefer to murder a child and spare the life of a butterfly. My stroll to the Unending along this rampart in ruins would perhaps appear less perplexing if it were uncovered that in the great metropolis sufficient measures of the velvety blood of oppression were spilled. I am not accountable if the human being provokes me to disgust while the mouse doesn't (if I were to discover a mouse in my soup tureen, it would be far more palatable than a human being) with my head propped up on a pillow of bats, reclining on a grassy plain of carnivorous plants, next to a woman whose lips are bloody suctioning cups, whose hair is obsidian fulguration, whose fingers are plush pile shelters for slumbering escargots, while eavesdropping on the distant baying of wolves, slumber would apprehend me imperceptibly like the swaying of a riverbed. I fall into slumber with open retinas, omnipresent like antennas trained on wherever bedsheets with virginal aspect erupt unsuspectedly like a volcano. The more beguiling the oscillation between two complementary colors manifests itself to me, the more I distinguish that their encounter in a third color is no more than provisional and that in their intimate substructure, in their unconfessed grottoes strolls this ungraspable phantom, white, in its mantle of tears. Out of a coincident impulse, to a degree deviant, I find black beguiling, I find this underwater diver costume beguiling, this facial powder mascara, and the absential existence of this color in the ecosphere provokes me to ponder a long procession of cowls, a chamber inside a castle with cloistered windows, a fountain reflecting stars during the course of the day, provokes me to even ponder butterflies.

Combien de fois, au moment de mettre du bleu, j'ai constat que j'en manquais! Alors j'ai pris du rouge et je l'ai mis la place du bleu. (Picasso). If I were a painter I would paint the trees in a landscape black and the pupil green. This exchange of colors between the eye that sees and what it is that is seen, apart from the theoretical value which I accord it in this grim antinomy where it occupies the place of synthesis, it corresponds on a lyric plane to the pallor of the human being who has been perusing its likeness for at least the last few tens of centuries in the echo of liquid, this narcissistic drama becoming, to the degree that the human being ceased to see only itself in this magical mirror, all the more convoluted in contemporary lyricism. This transposition of colors or fevers between the eye that sees and what it is that it sees, it seems to me is more alluring than two starving jackals that confer to one another the privilege to the next bite. Leaning over this magical looking glass the size of my eye and of the universe, I mistake intentionally my personal disquiet with that with that of humanity and find it unnecessary to keep in mind a sense of proportion when I ponder the passage of the woman who enraptures me through my chamber and that of a comet beguiled by the cosmic lure of the earth. And I am committing no metaphoric abuse when I liken the sliding of the strata that provokes earthquakes with the fingers she places over my forehead under which the plasma starts to quicken its pace, under which the blood begins to boil. It is time that this man makes an exit, this being with his head balancing on a tally and retina anchored to a caliper, which is preserved like holly relics in a basement in Paris, repulsive fetish of the occident. I breathe in the hair of the woman who enraptures me and a veritable forest fills my lungs, I grasp her lips between my lips and a veritable evening envelops me. In her vestment woven of wind and fog this enrapturing lover throws me kiss from her balcony without resorting to the intermediary of a rose. I ferry her in my arms along this rampart parallel to the ocean and while it dwindles into ruins our fingers sprout with leaves, birds warble, ivy soars, our tongue coils around a splinter of coal, we shatter it with our molars which suddenly transmute to a seeming alabaster. Could it be a mere exile from the kingdom, after this dolorous attempt to abandon the species, the repulsive human species, are we nearing the mineral realm, the vegetable, like those fish in flight, a tryst of wafting and tears? Tears and burning, could it be that they have adopted us? Are we their nuptial balcony, the dalliance park of the elements, this casino where life itself is to be gambled? Shall we pitch ourselves into the ocean, shall we hurl ourselves into the rampart? Shall we sink our teeth into the rocks, the waves, the shadow, the rose? Shall we costume ourselves in ruins and wrap this lump of sand in our gala frocks? Will you slip your satin slipper over the sand's foot? Do you think the phantoms taking up residence behind this rampart, the phantoms we await, will attend? Are we phantom enough?