Spring: -I- -II- -III-
The Stamp Album: -IV- -V- -VI- -VII- -VIII- -IX- -X- -XI- -XII-
In the Municipal Park: -XIII- -XIV- -XV- -XVI-
Springtime Twilight: (XVII)
The Villa: -XVIII- -XIX- -XX- -XXI- -XXII- -XXIII- -XXIV- -XXV- -XXVI- -XXVII-
Bianka’s Lineage: -XXVIII- -XXIX- -XXX- -XXXI- -XXXII- -XXXIII-
Hiatus: -XXXIV- -XXXV- -XXXVI- -XXXVII-
Finale: -XXXVIII- -XXXIX- -XL-
XVII
WHAT IS springtime twilight?
Have we reached the core of things — does that road lead no further? We have reached the limit of our words, which at this point go mad, delirious and jabbering. And yet it is only beyond their outskirts that what is inconceivable and inexpressible in this spring can begin. Twilight’s mystery play! Its dark, immeasurable element echoes only beyond our words, where the power of our magic no longer reaches. The word decomposes into its elements here, and unravels, returns to its etymology and retreats into its own depths, back to its dark root. Into the depths — how so? We mean it literally. See how it is growing dark — our words become lost among unclear associations: Acheron, Orcus, the Underworld... Do you sense how the gloom grows from these words, sprouting like a molehill, and how there is a waft of the depths, a cellar, a grave? What is springtime twilight? We ask that question once again, that that eager refrain of our investigations, to which no response comes.
When the tree roots want to speak, when a great many pasts, old novels and primeval stories are gathered beneath the turf, when too many breathless whispers are assembled beneath the roots, the inarticulate pulp and that unbreathing darkness that is prior to any word — then the bark of the trees blackens and falls apart in clumps, in thick flakes and deep slices, like bearskin, and their core lays bare its dark pores. Sinking one’s face into that downy fur of twilight, for a moment everything turns utterly dark, muffled and airless, as if a lid has closed. One must press one’s eyes like leeches to the blackest darkness to afford them the delicate force, to squeeze them through the impenetrable, to push right through the muffled soil, and suddenly, lo and behold, we are here, on the far side of things — we are in the deep, in the Underworld. And we can see...
Is not quite so dark here as we might have feared. Quite the reverse — the interior is pulsating throughout with light. It is, of course, the inner light of the roots that is marbling the darkness, an illusory phosphorescence, the faint veins of their illumination, the restless, luminous mirage of their substance. After all, this is only what we see in our dreams, cut off from the world, far astray in deep introversion, wending our way homeward to ourselves — then too can we see; we have clear sight under our closed eyelids, for our thoughts are ignited by an inner torch within us and burn hypnotically down long fuses, catching fire from crisscross to crisscross. Thus a regression takes place within us, all along the line, a withdrawal into the depths, a homeward journey to the roots. Thus we branch out in the depths of anamnesis, startled by the subterranean shudders that run through us, and we dream subcutaneously all over our hallucinative surface. For it is only up above, in the light — it must be told at last — that we are an eager and articulate collection of melodies, a luminous skylark’s apex — in the depths we crumble into black murmuring again, into vulgarism, a muddle of unfinished stories.
Only now can we see what this spring has been growing on, and why it is so unutterably sad and heavy with knowledge. Ah, we would not have believed it had we not seen it with our own eyes. Here are the labyrinths of the interior, storehouses and granaries of things; here are still warm graves, sawdust and dirt. Primeval stories. Seven layers, like in ancient Troy — corridors, chambers, treasure houses. How many golden masks, mask upon mask, flattened smiles, faces eaten out, mummies and empty chrysalises..? Here are those columbaria, those drawers for the dead, where they lie shrivelled, as black as roots, and await their time. Here are those great drysalteries where they are placed for sale in lachrymatories, crucibles and jars. They stand on their shelves for years, in long, solemn rows, but no one buys them. Perhaps they have already returned to life in the compartments of their cases, completely convalesced now, as clean and fragrant as incense — chirruping specifics, impatient, awakened medicines, balsams and morning ointments, weighing their early taste on the tip of their tongues. Those immured dovecots are full of beaks hatching out, their first, probing and luminous twittering. How matutinal and prior to all time it suddenly becomes in those long and empty lanes, where the dead awaken in rows, deeply rested — to a completely new dawn..!
*
* *
BUT we have not yet reached the end; we shall go deeper. Don’t be afraid. Give me your hand, if you please, and take another step — and we are at the roots, and at once everything becomes branchlike, murky and rooty, like deep in a forest. It smells of turf and sawdust — the roots wander into the darkness, entwine and rise up, and juices rise up into them in their inspiration, like drinking fountains. We are on the other side; we are at the lining of things, in basted darkness, threaded through with phosphorescence. Such circulation, movement and thronging. Such teeming and pressing of peoples and generations, Bibles and Iliads reproduced a thousandfold. Such wandering and turmoil, a tangle and tumult of stories. That road leads no further. We are at the very bottom, at the dark foundations. We are with the Mothers. Here are those endless infernos, those hopeless Ossianic expanses and those lamentable Nibelungs. Here are those great incubators of stories, those storyteller factories, the misty kilns of fables and fairytales. Now at last that great and sad mechanism of spring may be comprehended. Ah, it grows on stories. How many stories, how much history, how many fates! Everything we have ever read, all the stories we have ever heard, and all those stories that have loomed in our dreams since childhood — never heard — here and nowhere else is their abode and their homeland. Where else would writers derive their conceits, where would they take the courage of their inventiveness if they did not sense behind them these reserves, these assets, these hundredfold repeated narratives that the Underworld reverberates with? What a tangle of whispers; what a purring hubbub of the soil! Inexhaustible persuasion pulsates at your ear. You walk with half-closed eyes in that warmth of whispers, smiles and propositions — perpetually agitated, pricked a thousandfold by questions, as if by millions of sweet mosquito proboscides. They would like you to take something from them — anything, if only a pinch of that intangible, whispered history — to accept it into your young life, into your blood, to salt it away and go on living with it. For what is spring if not the resurrection of stories? Only it, among these intangibles, is alive, real, cool, and aware of nothing. Ah, how it draws those apparitions to its young green blood, to its vegetable unawareness — all those phantoms, those half-masks, those farfarels. And it takes them into its defenceless and naïve dream and sleeps with them, and awakes oblivious at dawn, and remembers nothing. That is why it is so heavy with that entire sum of the forgotten, and so sad, because it must live all alone on too many lives, too many — rejected and relinquished — to be beautiful... And in return it has only the abysmal scent of the bird cherry, flowing in one infinite and perpetual procedure, in which there is everything... For what does it mean to forget? New greenery has grown overnight on the old stories; a soft green deposit, a bright, thick budding is sprinkled in even bristles hour after hour like the crop of hair on a boy’s head on the day after a haircut. Spring now grows so green with oblivion; how the old trees recover their sweet and naïve unawareness; how their twigs awaken, unburdened by memory, their roots submerged in ancient history! This greenery will be read once more as if anew, syllabised from the beginning; and from that greenery the stories will be rejuvenated, and begin again, as if never told before.
There is so much unborn history. Oh, those doleful choruses among the roots, those chants, each drowning out the other, those inexhaustible monologues combining in suddenly exploding improvisations! Have you the patience to hear them? Before the oldest story ever heard, there were others you have never heard —its anonymous predecessors, untitled novels, enormous, pale and monotonous epopees, shapeless ancient ballads, ill-proportioned hulks and faceless giants filling the horizon, dark texts under the eventide dramas of the clouds, and further still — legendary books, books never written, pretender eternal-books, books lost and astray in partibus infidelium...
*
* *
Amongst all the stories amassing at the roots of spring there is one, not pulled up yet, which long ago fell into the night’s possession, and which has settled forever at the bottom of the firmaments — an eternal accompaniment and background to the starlit expanses. Through every spring night, no matter what happens in it, that story walks with great strides over the enormous croaking of frogs and the endless turning of mills. That man walks on beneath the starlit grist spilling out of the night’s handmill, clasping a baby in the folds of his overcoat, continually on his way in an unending migration through the infinite expanses of the night. O enormous sorrow of loneliness — O boundless orphanhood in the expanses of the night — O brilliance of distant stars! Time can no longer change anything in that story. At every moment it passes straight through the astral horizons, passing by us with great strides, and thus it will be forever, over and over again, for once it was derailed from the tracks of time it became unfathomable, abysmal, never to be exhausted by repetition. That man walks, clasping the child in his arms — we repeat the refrain deliberately, the motif of the wretched night, in order to express that intermittent continuity of passing by — covered by the intermittent tangle of stars, at times completely invisible, for long mute periods through which eternity winnows. Faraway worlds approach very near — terribly bright, they send vehement signals through eternity in mute, unutterable reports — and he walks onward, calming the little girl continuously, monotonously and without hope, helpless before that whispering, those terrifyingly sweet persuasions of the night, and that single word formed by the mouth of silence when no one is listening to it...
It is the story of a princess, abducted and exchanged.
> -XVIII- >