Someone just died but I’m still alive and yet I don’t have a
soul any
more. All I have left is a transparent body inside of which transparent doves hurl themselves on a transparent
dagger held
by a transparent
hand. I see struggle in all its beauty, real struggle which nothing can measure, just before the last star comes out. The rented body I live in like
a hut detests the soul I had which floats in the distance. It’s time to put an end to that famous dualism for which I’ve been so much reproached. Gone are the days when eyes without light and rings drew sediment from the pools
of color. There’s neither red nor blue any more. Unanimous red-blue fades away in turn like a robin redbreast in the hedges of
inattention. Someone
just died, -- not you or I or they exactly, but all of us, except me who survives by a variety of
means: I’m still cold for example. That’s enough. A match! A match! Or how about some rocks so I can split them, or some birds so I
can follow them, or some corsets so I can tighten them around dead women’s waists so they’ll come back to life and love me, with their exhausting hair, their disheveled glances! A match, so no one dies for brandied plums, a match so the Italian straw hat can be
more than a play! Hey,
lawn! Hey, rain! I’m the unreal breath of
this garden. The black
crown resting on my head is a cry of migrating crows because up till now there
have only been those who were buried alive, and only a few of them, and here I am the first aerated dead man. But I have a body so I can stop doing myself in, so I can force reptiles to admire
me. Bloody hands, mistletoe eyes, a mouth of dried leaves and glass (the dried leaves move under the glass;
they’re not as red as one would think, when indifference exposes its voracious
methods), hands
to gather
you, miniscule thyme of my dreams, rosemary of my extreme pallor. I don’t have a shadow anymore, either. Ah my shadow, my dear shadow. I should write a long letter to the shadow I
lost. I’d begin it, My Dear Shadow. Shadow,
my darling. You see. There’s no more
sun. There’s only one tropic left out of two. There’s only one man left in a thousand. There’s only one woman left in
the absence of thought that
characterizes in pure black this accursed era. The
woman holds a bouquet of
everlastings shaped like my blood.
André Breton, The Forest In The Axe,
ca. 1931, trans.
Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow
Bruce Nauman: 100 Live and Die (1984)
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