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 is canonical history. But the official story remains incomplete. There are intentional gaps in it, long pauses and concealments — where spring quickly installs itself. It promptly overgrows those gaps with its own marginalia, bribes them with its innumerous, sprinkling leafage, its foliage racing to outgrow itself, and strung along by the absurdities of the birds, the controversies of those winged creatures, all contradiction and lies, their naïve questions without answers, their obstinate and pretentious repetitions. A great deal of patience is required in order to find the true text beyond that confusion. A careful analysis of spring will lead to it, 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, their shy reflexive pronouns, in order to isolate gradually a healthy grain of meaning. In this, the stamp album is a signpost of the highest order for me. Foolish, unsophisticated spring! It indiscriminately covers everything. It interweaves sense and nonsense, clowning perpetually, playing the impudent fool. Was it not also allied with Franz Joseph I? Is it not bound to him by the ties of a co-conspiracy? One must remember that every half 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, mixing up the syntax with their erroneous punctuation. And so the truth is hunted down from all sides, all through that verdant 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, those itinerant and beggarly canticles which descend in a direct line from the stamp album?
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