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 are at the limit of our words, which now turn crazy, delirious and jabbering. And yet, only beyond their outskirts can begin what is inconceivable and inexpressible in this spring — twilight’s mystery play! Only beyond our words does its dark, immeasurable element resound, where the power of our magic no longer reaches. Here, the word decomposes into its elements, and unravels; it returns to its etymology, and retreats into the depths, into its own dark root. How so, into the depths? We understand it literally. See how it is growing dark. Our words flounder among unclear associations: Acheron, Orcus, the Underworld... Do you sense how the gloom grows from these words, sprouting up like a molehill, and that there is a waft of the depths, of a cellar, of the grave? What is springtime twilight? We ask that question once again, that eager refrain of our investigations, to which there comes no reply.
When the tree roots want to speak, when beneath the turf a great many pasts, old novels and primæval stories are gathered, when beneath the roots too many breathless whispers are assembled — inarticulate pulp and that unbreathing darkness that is prior to any word — then the bark of the trees turns black, and falls away in clumps, in thick flakes and deep slices, and their core lays bare its dark pores, like bearskin. 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...
It is not quite so dark here as we might have feared. Quite the reverse — the interior pulsates throughout with light. This is, of course, the inner light of the roots, their illusory phosphorescence, their faint veins of illumination marbling the darkness, the restless, luminous mirage of their substance. It is, after all, no more than we see in our dreams, cut off from the world, far astray in deep introversion, wending our way homeward to ourselves; for then too can we see, see clearly under our closed eyelids, since our thoughts catch fire within us from an inner torch, and smoulder hypnotically down long fuses, burning from crisscross to crisscross. Thus there takes place within us a regression, all along the line, a withdrawal into the depths, a homeward journey to the roots. Thus we branch out into the depths of anamnesis, startled by the subterranean shudders that run through us. Thus we dream subcutaneously, all over our hallucinative surface. For it is only up above, in the light — lest it nevermore be said — that we are an eager and articulate collection of melodies, a luminous skylark’s apex. In the depths, we crumble once more into black murmuring and vulgarisms, 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, mould and mulch. Primæval stories. Seven layers, like in ancient Troy. Corridors, chambers, treasure houses. How many golden masks, mask after 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 the tongue. 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, empty lanes, where the dead awaken in rows, deeply rested — to a completely new dawn...!
*
* *
But we have not yet reached the end; we are going 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 as branchlike, murky and rooty as the depths of a forest. It smells of turf and mould. The roots wander into the darkness, intertwine, and rise up; juices are drawn up into them in their inspiration, like drinking pumps. We are on the other side. We have reached the lining of things, in basted darkness threaded throughout 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, 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 events, 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. From where else would writers derive their conceits, from where could they take the courage of their inventiveness if they did not sense behind them these reserves, these assets, these hundredfold repeated narratives with which the Underworld reverberates? What a tangle of whispers, what purring hubbub of the soil! Inexhaustible persuasion pulsates at your ear. You walk with 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, and 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? It alone 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. It takes them into its defenceless and naïve dream, and sleeps with them. And it awakens at dawn, oblivious, remembering nothing. That is why it is so heavy with that entire sum of things forgotten, and so sad, for it must live alone on too many lives, too many rejected and relinquished lives to remain beautiful... And all it has in return is the abysmal scent of hagberry, flowing in one infinite and perpetual current, 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 by hour, like the crop of hair on a boy’s head a 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 this greenery, the stories will be rejuvenated, and begin again, as if never before told.
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 clouds, and further still, legendary books, books never written, pretender eternal-books, errant and lost books in partibus infidelium...
*
* *
Among all the stories that amass at the roots of spring, there is one, not yet uprooted, which long ago fell into the possession of the night, and settled at the bottom of its firmaments for ever — an eternal accompaniment and background to the starry expanses. That story walks through every spring night, come what may. It walks with great strides, over the enormous croaking of frogs and the endless turning of mills. Under the starlit grist spilling from night’s handmill, there walks a man, clasping a baby in the folds of his overcoat — continually on his way on an unending journey through the night’s infinite expanses. 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 any given moment, it passes straight through the astral horizons, passes us by with great strides, and thus it will be for ever, over and over again. For once it had been derailed from the tracks of time, it became unfathomable and abysmal, never to be exhausted by repetition. That man walks onward, clasping the child in his arms — we repeat the refrain deliberately, the motif of the wretched night, in order to express the intermittent continuity with which it passes us by, covered by the intermittent tangle of the stars — at times completely invisible, for long mute periods through which eternity blows. Faraway worlds approach very near — terribly bright, they send in mute, unutterable reports vehement signals through eternity. And he walks onward, calming the little girl continuously, monotonously and hopelessly, helpless before that whispering, those terrifyingly sweet persuasions of the night, 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- >