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-
XXXIII
SO MUCH canonical history. And yet the official story remains incomplete. There are intentional gaps, long pauses, and matters left unaddressed in which spring quickly installs herself. It promptly overgrows those gaps with its own marginalia, bribes them with its innumerable sprinkling leafage, its foliage racing to outgrow itself, strung along with the absurdities of the birds, the controversy of those winged, so full of contradiction and lies, naïve questions without answers and obstinate, pretentious repetitions. A great deal of patience is needed in order to find the true text beyond this confusion. Which leads to a careful analysis of spring, a parsing of its sentences and phrases: what and who — of what and of whom. One must eliminate the evasive insinuations of the birds, their pointed adverbs and prepositions and their shy reflexive pronouns in order gradually to isolate a healthy grain of meaning. In this, the stamp album is for me a signpost of the highest order. Foolish, unsophisticated spring! Indiscriminately it covers everything, interweaves sense and nonsense, perpetually clowning — playing the fool, thoroughly impudent. Was it not also allied with Franz Joseph I — is it not bound to him by the ties of a co-conspiracy? It must be remembered that every half an ounce of meaning that hatches out in this spring is immediately talked down by hundredfold boasting, by some babbling nonsense or other. Here the birds cover their traces, mix up the syntax with their erroneous punctuation. Thus truth is hunted down from all sides throughout that lush spring, which immediately overgrows every available inch, every crevice with its leafy blooming. Where else, accursed, will it find asylum if not there, where no one is looking for it — in those market-stall calendars and almanacs, in those mendicant and beggarly canticles which descend in a direct line from the stamp album?
> -XXXIV- >