Comme un hommme

"La grandeur d'un métier est peut-être, avant tout, d'unir les hommes : il n'est qu'un luxe véritable, et c'est celui des relations humaines."

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des hommes (1939)

Je ne sais plus si j'ai déjà publié cette citation qui guide certains de mes choix depuis de nombreuses années. Toujours est-il qu'elle est revenue sur le tapis, une fois de plus, hier, et quelques jours avant aussi, qu'elle a résonné comme des cloches d'église, pour un ami comme pour moi, un ami qui s'est tenu comme un homme, avec une dignité qui me fit retirer mon chapeau alors, et qui plus tard me fit lever mon verre de bière, seul, pour porter un toast à la santé de ceux qui sont partis peut-être trop tôt parce qu'on n'avait pas eu le temps d'achever certaines phrases, et à la santé de ceux qui continuent de parler, et de marcher, avec ou sans moi, près ou loin de moi, mais qui sont là.

Mon ami, toi qui lis ces lignes, lis ce roman qui me hante, lis ces phrases dont presque toutes pourraient être des citations comme autant de choix de vie.

University of the Self

"The greatest university of all is a collection of books."

Thomas Carlyle, writer, essayist, teacher, historian (1795-1881)

"Last Letter", by Ted Hughes

What happened that night? Your final night.
Double, treble exposure
Over everything. Late afternoon, Friday,
My last sight of you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,
With that strange smile. Had I bungled your plan?
Had it surprised me sooner than you purposed?
Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been gone
Where I could not have traced you.
I would have turned from your locked red door
That nobody would open
Still holding your letter,
A thunderbolt that could not earth itself.
That would have been electric shock treatment
For me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,
As often as I read it, or thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.
The treatment that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagine
How I would have got through that weekend.
I cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?

Your note reached me too soon—-that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office
And added to your load. I moved fast,
Through the snow-blue, February, London twilight.
Wept with relief when you opened the door.
A huddle of riddles in solution. Precocious tears
That failed to interpret to me, failed to divulge
Their real import. But what did you say
Over the smoking shards of that letter
So carefully annihilated, so calmly,
That let me release you, and leave you
To blow its ashes off your plan—-off the ashtray
Against which you would lean for me to read
The Doctor’s phone-number.
                                                 My escape
Had become such a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,
Only wanting to be recaptured, only
Wanting to drop, out of its vacuum.
Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.
Two days in no calendar, but stolen
From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-life
With its two mad needles,
Embroidering their rose, piercing and tugging
At their tapestry, their bloody tattoo
Somewhere behind my navel,
Treading that morass of emblazon,
Two mad needles, criss-crossing their stitches,
Selecting among my nerves
For their colours, refashioning me
Inside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,

Their obsessed in and out. Two women
Each with her needle.

                                       That night
My dellarobbia Susan. I moved
With the circumspection
Of a flame in a fuse. My whole fury
Was an abandoned effort to blow up
The old globe where shadows bent over
My telltale track of ashes. I raced
From and from, face backwards, a film reversed,
Towards what? We went to Rugby St
Where you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all places
Why did we go there? Perversity
In the artistry of our fate
Adjusted its refinements for you, for me
And for Susan. Solitaire
Played by the Minotaur of that maze
Even included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.
You had noted her—-a girl for a story.
You never met her. Few ever met her,
Except across the ears and raving mask
Of her Alsatian. You had not even glimpsed her.
You had only recoiled
When her demented animal crashed its weight
Against her door, as we slipped through the hallway;
And heard it choking on infinite German hatred.

That Sunday night she eased her door open
Its few permitted inches.
Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappy
Overweight, lovely face, that peeped out
Across the little chain. The door closed.
We heard her consoling her jailor
Inside her cell, its kennel, where, days later,
She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.

Susan and I spent that night
In our wedding bed. I had not seen it
Since we lay there on our wedding day.
I did not take her back to my own bed.
It had occurred to me, your weekend over,
You might appear—-a surprise visitation.
Did you appear, to tap at my dark window?
So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,
In our own wedding bed—-the same from which
Within three years she would be taken to die
In that same hospital where, within twelve hours,
I would find you dead.
                                                  Monday morning
I drove her to work, in the City,
Then parked my van North of Euston Road
And returned to where my telephone waited.

What happened that night, inside your hours,
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen,
As if it was not happening. How often
Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver—-
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

At what position of the hands on my watch-face
Did your last attempt,
Already deeply past
My being able to hear it, shake the pillow
Of that empty bed? A last time
Lightly touch at my books, and my papers?
By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,
Already filled with the snowlit morning light.
I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.
And I had started to write when the telephone
Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm,
Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.
Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’



Reblogged from this address.

Passe-muraille

"There comes a time in a man's life when to get where he has to -- if there are no doors or windows -- he walks through a wall."

Bernard Malamud, novelist and short-story writer (1914-1986)

Funeral March

Today we took a northbound train

Whose end was its beginning.

We went to one of our funerals.

Again.

We ploughed through the countryside,

Restlessly.

We was silent; out of respect, mostly.

The dawning sun threaded the haphazard mesh of the humilis and mediocris.

Eos rhododaktylos was with us.

Fogus impenetrabilis was there too.

Isabella's dead.

But she wasn't the one we was burying today.

Yet she's still dead.

The train was booming in and out of tunnels

Our ears blocked momentarily.

The night before the wake had gotten us pondering -

Alcohol does that to us,

Great disinhibitor nonwithstanding -

Ain't we vying with each other

And with-in ourselves

For the exact same thing

And for that very thing

Which makes us human?

Ya, fort und da. The rest is somewhere in between the blanks.

We also realised, putting our glasses down for the night,

That we had just acquired

A certain kind of expertise on death.

They say the devil attends every single funeral there is.

We hope he liked what he saw today.

We was an orderly, sobbing crowd,

Marching solemnly, uptight,

Aligned, with one step.

As if we was an only man.

We wept what we thought was the dead's untimely departure.

Not the dead per se.

Our kerchiefs were wet with our tears

And with the mucus from our runny nose.

Red eyes and bags underneath our eyelids.

We wrenched our hands in agony.

A discerning priest would've smelt remorse and sin a mile off.

The taste of the host was that of lemon.

Made us cringe.

A truly poorly, heartbreaking sight.

We chanted and prayed.

We lifted the spirit of the deceased as much as we lifted ours.

We knelt by the coffin. There was a hiatus there,

A hiatus waiting to be filled.

This hiatus was scarring us to death, for sure,

As it was expected,
As we was sure we was going to have to have a look
at it from the dead man's stance, at some point.

So we redoubled our chanting.

Our prayers became more sincere.

We mourned and mourned.

Cried our hearts out

for the only viable reason there ever was.

Terror does that to us.

When all was said and the deed was done,

When the last bell had rung and its echo had faded,

We went back home-home.

There we drank a full glass of scotch

Bottoms-up

And shelved the day for future use.

Combustion

"What is to give light must endure burning."

Viktor Frankl, author, neurologist and psychiatrist, Holocaust survivor (1905-1997)

Manimal

"Men are the devils of the earth and the animals are its tormented souls."

Arthur Schopenhauer, philosopher (1788-1860)

Whys and wherefores

"When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist."

Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

Sartorius

"Le destin passe et repasse à travers nous, comme l'aiguille du cordonnier à travers le cuir qu'il façonne."

Amin Maalouf, Le Rocher de Tanios (1993)

Blessing in disguise

"Since my house burned down
I now own a better view
of the rising moon."


Mizuta Masahide, poet and samurai, student under Matsuo Bashō (1657-1723)