Kitsch Kaleidoscopes

***

***

Kaléidoscope

(A Germain Nouveau)

Dans une rue, au coeur d'une ville de rêve
Ce sera comme quand on a déjà vécu :
Un instant à la fois très vague et très aigu...
Ô ce soleil parmi la brume qui se lève !

Ô ce cri sur la mer, cette voix dans les bois !
Ce sera comme quand on ignore des causes ;
Un lent réveil après bien des métempsycoses :
Les choses seront plus les mêmes qu'autrefois



Dans cette rue, au coeur de la ville magique
Où des orgues moudront des gigues dans les soirs,
Où les cafés auront des chats sur les dressoirs
Et que traverseront des bandes de musique.

***

***

Ce sera si fatal qu'on en croira mourir :
Des larmes ruisselant douces le long des joues,
Des rires sanglotés dans le fracas des roues,
Des invocations à la mort de venir,






Des mots anciens comme un bouquet de fleurs fanées !
Les bruits aigres des bals publics arriveront,
Et des veuves avec du cuivre après leur front,
Paysannes, fendront la foule des traînées


Qui flânent là, causant avec d'affreux moutards
Et des vieux sans sourcils que la dartre enfarine,
Cependant qu'à deux pas, dans des senteurs d'urine,
Quelque fête publique enverra des pétards.

***

***

***

Ce sera comme quand on rêve et qu'on s'éveille,
Et que l'on se rendort et que l'on rêve encor
De la même féerie et du même décor,
L'été, dans l'herbe, au bruit moiré d'un vol d'abeille.

Paul Verlaine, Jadis et naguère

***

A piece of cake ...

"Her picture's in the papers now, And life's a piece of cake." Ogden Nash, The Primrose Path, (John Lane The Bodley Head, London, 1936)

Tübingen, Janner (3) _ "Pallaksch, Pallaksch”_ 3 Perspectives

In his book Désaccordée comme par de la neige. (et) Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986,André Du Bouchet quotes repeatedly the word "Pallaksch," and emphasize its strangeness.

"Pallaksch, Pallaksch!”: le mot de la langue que l'on ignore". According to Du Bouchet the expression "Pallaksch, Pallaksch” is outside of any tongue at first glance recognizable.

At first reading “Pallaksch, Pallaksch” are neither comprehensible nor in comprehensible. They are inhuman words, words that touch something other than language, that say simultaneously yes and no, that I am and I’m not.

André Du Bouchet,Désaccordée comme par de la neige. (et) Tübingen, le 22 mai 1986, (Le Mercure de France, 1989), pp. 68-69.

On the same suject Frédéric Marteau argues in the second part of his doctoral dissertation:

From Tübingen, Jänner to Huedibluh, Celan poems often emphasized the babbling as poetic practice. In Schneepart, it gives a poem this eloquent title: "The world to babble": Die nachzustotternde Welt . Because this endpoint indicates ruin and is simultaneously the possibility of a reversal. Words fall on page, syntax is broken, and disaggregation seems unending - only, the poem is there, it stands and repeatedly reborn from its ashes - it stands still.

As reported by F.Marteau, Celan always insisted on the necessity of stuttering language, it will be a question of making language to babble . The only possible event, the event of the poem may be in effect only a babbling, as in the poem on Hölderlin.

The word "pallaksch" seems to mean the indeterminacy of the Yes and No; Hölderlin would have used it to say either Yes or No, depending of the context. Underlying Glossolalia (*) therefore maintains this dialectic hesitation which suspends the discourse on its affirmation-negation, where No is not separated from the Yes and where speech may at any time be reversing into its opposite. To babble, is to construct a movement of repetition distorting a word so that it may express otherwise, beyond the evidences of its communication. A word dug grooves which are therefore Cree page for another reading, understanding each other, but in a strangeness maintained such and without insurance. Nothing provides to the babbler the advent of his word. What twists the words followed when it seems to happen to us? Stuttering is not the affirmation of a necessary step to accomplished poetic “non-language”. The poem stutters as seeks a different path. Seeks to say otherwise, strangely. It reverses, himself. The poem fled by edges, limitations and gaps in its material, its silence or its non-language. Splinters, beats: something just working language, something beyond grammar, and which makes flee and shows its limits.

F., Marteau, Le Dess(e)in de l’écriture, une poétique de la lecture Paul Celan et Charles Racine, Paris, Décembre,2006), pp. 339,395-396

(*) Glossolalia is fabricated, meaningless speech.
According to Dr. William T. Samarin, professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto, glossolalia consists of strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly .... Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language (Nickell, 108).When spoken by schizophrenics, glossolalia are recognized as gibberish.


According to Anne Carson the poet's ability to praise, at all cost, saves us, enlarges us, and teaches us to see beyond to a freedom of Being which is easily lost in the material world.
Her study of poetic and aesthetic thinking with all its fascinating and challenging twists and turns of phrase, its awkward glances at the human, serves a larger purpose—acts, itself, as a metaphor for self-knowledge. As Simonides and Celan respond to the world's absences and losses, Carson interrogates their work and defines the forms, of emptiness, in which they lived and wrote. Fascinated by the "bottomless places for reading" she finds in the literature of negation, excision, emptiness, and denial, "economy" becomes in her hands a multi-layered term which tells us not only about the exchange of money for art; but also suffering for wisdom; and emptiness and negation for assertion and fullness. For her Simonides and Celan "make use of the void in order to think the full."
She wrote about Tübingen, Jänner:

The poem is a praise of Hölderlin’s . It begins with his “riddle” and ends with his Pallaksch. Both for quotations are taken from the world of words that held good for him. “A riddle is the purely originated” com from his Rhine Hymn and Pallaksch Pallaksch is a term he liked to utter in his late years to mean “sometimes yes sometimes no.” He was mad in his later years. You can call Pallaksch nonsense. Yet a few pages ago we read and made sense of Celan’s admonition. “Keep yes and no unsplit.” A word for “Yes and No” out of the collocation of visible and invisibles, out of the absent presence of gods in human rooms, out of alchemy out of memory , out of the rules for the elegiac meter and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, out of strangeness, hospitality, sleep, prayer and commodity exchange. But to be useful, poetic invention has to measure itself against the words that are given and possible, has to tease itself out of the unknown trough a language mesh where everything ugly, blameworthy, incommensurable or made is filtered out remarkable how Celan brings Hölderlin trough the riddle and all language mesh, “A riddle is the purely originated.” In its context, this sentence begins the fourth strophe of Hölderlin’s Der Rheine and can be ad backward of forward. Origin as riddle. Riddle as origin, like p. 132 the source of the Rhine, pure origine is hard to specify. “Even poetry can scarcely unveil it,” says the poet. I suspect Celan likes the pun that informs Hölderlin’s riddle. His line breaks and word division emphasize the parts of Hölderlin’s German word Reinprungenes, which means “purely originated” but also sounds like “Rhine-originated” and perhaps even suggests “Der Rhein-originated.” Pure source, the river Rhine and the poem “Rhine” come together on a point from which rich sense flows. If language were a commerce, punning. Would be its usury. Aristotle tells us that usury is the most unnatural sort of weath-getting because it allows money to breed money out of itself instead of being spent as it was intend. (Note 16: Politics 1258b) Analogously, punning generates an unnatural supplement of significance from a sound that properly expends itself is one meaning alone.
If meaning were expenditure, this riddle would not be cheap. Many a poet or patriarch has paid with his eyes for the privilege of wasting words. Celan implies Hölderlin’s place in the tradition with a long repetitive conditional sentence (käme… zuzu) that ends in a burst of Hölderlin’s private language. Now a private language is a kind of riddle. It raises the same problem of pure origin: you cannot get behind the back of it. Pallaksch Pallaksch is the own clue. On the other hand, from Hölderlin’s point of view, Pallaksch, Pallaksch may be an utterance that captures the whole of the truth purely originated. Celan allows for this possibility when he cites the phrase in brackets ─ that silent veil he likes to throw around his own riddles.

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost: Simonides of Keo with Paul Celan, (Martin Classical Letters, New York, Princeton University Press, 1999), pp.131-132.

A Labyrinth _ Celan's poem: Tübingen, Jänner (2 ) _ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Analysis

I must remark ... that my posts are only a few quotes and modest notes, for my own pleasure, about the themes I'm fond ...

In his book Poetry as Experience, on "Part I -Two Poems by Paul Celan"(1) - a dense yet incisive text - Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe deals with the status of poetry and the question of Celan's poetry translation. His approach is an attempt to overcome this and to ask: What is going on in methods, what is occurring during the commentary/translation/research process? Two key aspects of Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking are that translators shall respect the specificity, the very essence of Celan's language and that his language is irrevocably invulnerable to translation/interpretation, because the crucial question of Celan´s poetry is the possibility/impossibility of meaning. Language no longer controls anything, but rather memorializes the nullyfing of concepts and the disruption of the suject.

We can say that each translation almost produces a new poem ...

In this context he presents the translations bellow [...]"only so we can see where we stand." But, he thinks it necessary to remark that the mallarmean style of André du Bouchet's translations does not do justice to the the lapidary hardness, the abruptness of language as handled by Celan. Or rather, the language that held him, ran through him. Especially in his late work, prosody and sintax do violence to language: they chop, dislocate, truncate or cut it. Something in this certainly bears comparison to what occurs in Hölderlin’s last, “paratactic” efforts as Adorno calls them: condensation and juxtaposition, a strangling of language. But no lexical “refinement”, or very little, even when he opts for a sort of “surreal” handling of metaphor or “image”, he does not depart from essentially simple, naked language. For example, the “such” (telle) used twice as a demonstrative in the “mallarmean” translation of “Tübingen Janvier” is a turn of phrase totally foreign to Celan’ style. Even more so the “A cecité même/mues, pupilles”. (To blindness itself/moved pupils). That begins the same poem in what is indeed the most obscure way possible.

Philippe Lacove-Labarthe believes that the poem "Tübingen, Jänner": [...]to be untranslatable, including within their own language, and indeed, for this reason, invulnerable to commentary. They necessarily escape interpretation; they forbid it. One could even say they are written to forbid it. This why the sole question carrying them, as it carried all Celan´s poetry, is that of meaning, the possibility of meaning.
Philippe Lacove-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990), pp.12-13.

(1) "Tübingen, Jänner" and "Todtnauberg."

Tübingen, Janvier

A cecité même
mues, pupilles.
Leur – “énigme cela,
qui est pur
jaillissement” ─, leur
mémoire de
tours Hölderlin nageant, d’un battement de mouettes
serties.

Visite de menuisiers engloutis par
telles
paroles plongeant.

S’il venait,
venait un home,
un home venait au monde aujourd’hui avec
claret et barbe des
patriaches: il lui faudrait,
dû-il parler de telle
époque, il lui faudrait
babiller uniquement babiller
toujours et toujours ba
biller iller

(“Pallaksch.Pallaksch.”)

Traduction André du Bouchet in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op.cit., p. 9

Tübingen, Janvier

Des yeux sous les paroles
aveuglés.
Leur ─ “énigme
ce qui naît
de source pur”─, leur
souvenir de
tours Hölderlin nageant, tournoyées
de mouettes.

Visite de menuisiers engloutis par
Telles
paroles plongeant:

S’il venait,
venait un homme,
venait un homme au monde aujourd’hui, avec
la barbe de claret
des patriarches: il devrait,
s’il parlait de ce
temps, il
devrait
bágayer seulement bégayer
toutoujours
bégayer.

(“Pallaksch.Pallaksch.”)

Traduction Martine Broda, in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., p.10


Tübingen, Janvier

Sous un flot d’éloquence
aveuglés , les yeux.
Leurs ─ “une énigme est le
pur jailli” ─ leur
mémoire de
tours Hölderlin nageant, tour ─
noyées de mouettes.

Visite de meunuisiers submergés sous
ces
paroles plongeant.

Viendrait,
viendrait un homme
viendrait un home au monde, aujourd’hui, avec
la barbe de lumière des Patriarches: il n’aurait,
parlerait-il de ce
temps, il
n’aurait
qu’à bégayer, bégayer
sans sans
sans cesse.
(“Pallaksch. Pallaksch.”)

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthen in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, op. cit., p.16

Tübingen, January

Beneath a flow of eloquence
blinded, the eyes.
Their – “an
enigma is the
pure sprung forth” -, their
memory of
Hölderlin towers swimming,
wheeled with gulls.

Joiner’s visits submerged beneath
these
diving words:

If there came
if there came a man
if there came a man into the world today, with
the beard of light of the
Patriarchs: he would need only,
if he spoke of this
time, he would need only,
to stutter, stutter
without, without
without cease.

(Pallaksch. Pallaksch.)

Philippe Lacove-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990), pp.16-17.

I consider this analysis deeply insightfull:

What these few, barely phrases say, in their extenuated discourse, stuttering on the edge of silence or the incomprehensible (gibberish, idiomatic language “Pallaksh”), is not a “story”, they do not recount anything, and most certainly not a visit to the Hölderlinturm in Tübingen. They undoubtedly mean something; a “message”, as it were, is delivered. They present, in any case, an intelligible utterance: if a man, a Jewish man ─ a Sage, a Prophet, or one of the Righteous, “with/the beard of light of/the Patriarchs”, ─ wanted today to speak forth about the age as Hölderlin did in his time, he would be condemned to stammer in the manner, let us say, of Beckett’s “metaphysical tramps”. He would sink into aphasia (or “pure idiome”), as we are told Höderlin did. In any case, Hölderlin’s “madness”, came to define the aphasic myth:

Mnemosyne

A sign we are, meaningless
Painless we are and have nearly
Lost our language in foreign places

Hölderlin

[...]

Philippe Lacove-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1990), p.17.

In the article "Catastrophe" Philippe Lacove-Labarthe argues that "Tübbingen, Jänner literally shatters an image (the reflection)", "Patriarch's beard of light, the stammering" "they may indeed secretly have only one object: the interdiction against representation" [...]

Philippe Lacove-Labarthe, "Catastrophe" in Aris Fioretos, Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, (The John Hopkins University Press, 1994, PP.130-158.

A Labyrinth _ Celan's poem: Tübingen, Jänner (1)

The first impression of the poem points to the work and life of Hölderlin. In the first stanza Celan quotes a sentence : “ein Räitsel its Reinentsprunges” […] from the swabian poet hymn "Der Rhein." (1)

But, in his speech "The Meridian"(2) Celan also alludes to Georg Büchner personage Lenz who became insane in the 20th January. Another significant fact for Celan took place on January 20, 1942: the Wannsee Conference. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's second in command of the SS organization, convened a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to determine the future of the jewish population and coordinate the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."

Celan focuses attention and adds details about the last years of Hölderlin’s life on referring Hölderlintürme. In Tübingen, after doctors diagnosed Hölderlin’s mental illness, the carpenter Ernst Zimmer and his family took care of him and logged the poet in their home at a tower overlooking the Neckar. He lived there for 36 years until his dead. The Schreiner of the second stanza evokes Zimmer.

The poem includes another Hölderlin quotation: (“Pallaksch. Pallaksch”), a nonsense expression often used by Hölderlin during his insanity, documented by the poet first biographer Christoph Theodor Schwab. (3)

Hölderlin, Louise Keller drawing (1842)

A recurrent theme in Hölderlin’s poetry is the complex relations among human’s world and the goods sphere. He conceives the poet as a mediator between the two levels. Analogically the content of Tübinger Jänner expresses a crucial problem of Celan’s own poetry: the possibility or impossibility of language and communication. Heike Bartel wrote about the suject as follows:

[...] Celan makes many references to language and speech in Tübingen, Jänner and therefore chooses the fowlling expressions: Zür Blindheit über-/redete[…]tauchenden […]worten[…]. Sprächer, lallen und lallen ─ like the words describing movement in the same poem, Erinnerung; Schwimmen; umschwirren, tauchenden ─ the terms referring to language cannot be pinned down easily either.

The first and second ones are integrated in complex metaphors: Zür Blindheit über-/redete/Augen; bei/diesen/tauchend Worten. They are difficult to interpret, but it is obvious that both combine two different spheres with each other. Zür Blindheit über-/redete/Augen combines seeing-or-not seeing in this case – and speaking. [B]ei/diesen/tauchenden, worten describes how words - usually articulated through the air – are moving through water. The third therm – Sprächer – is written in the subjunctive mood the “coniuntius irrealis”, showing that something is not a fact but is restricted by certain conditions and dependent on the surrounding circumstances. The last one describes a way of talking without sense or differentiation, language determines the last three lines of the poem where the text itself descends into bable repeating words and exchanging syllables in a seemingly absurd manner: Käme/ Käme […], /Käme immer-immer-/Zuzu. [...] (4)

Isaac Sinclair (1775-1815)

Notes

(1) This poem was dedicated to Isaac Sinclair one of Hölderlin’s closest and most loyal friends. Höderlin characterized the structure of the hymn as follows:

The law of this poem [dieses Gesanges] is that the first two parts are formally opposed as progression and regression but are alike in subject matter the two succeeding parts are formally alike but are opposed as regards subject matter the last part, however, balances everything out with a continuos metaphor.

Friedrich Holderlin and Eric.L. Santner (ed), Hyperion and selected poems, (Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd. , 2002), Endnotes, p.295

(2) P. Celan, "The Meridian", in John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, (New York - London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) pp. 401-413.

"Hör ich’s da auch, sagt’s der Wind auch?Hör ich’s immer, immer zu, stich tot, tot." ( Do I hear it there, too, does the windsay it, too? Hear it always, always, on, on, stick dead, dead.”) Lenz, Georg Biichner

(3)Thomas Bosche on Kurtag's interpretation of Celan's poem: The Celan poem with which Kurtag concludes the cycle may offer a key to the Holderlin songs as a whole, embodying as it does a view of the poet Holderlin from the perspective of our own age. The title "Tubingen, Janner" is a twofold allusion: to Holderlin's town, of course, and to Lenz's "20. Janner". The Holderlin tower is described as afloat; the joiner Zimmer, who took in the sick poet, is drowned. The Neckar proves to be, not "that which cultivates the land / Which nourishes father and beloved children / In cities that it founded", as Holderlin had praised the Rhine in an ode to the river, from which Celan quotes the line "Ein Ratsel ist Reinent-sprungenes..."["an enigma is the purely originated"]. The words that might describe a poet today seem to spring from the Neckar, but are described as "submerging". Celan inverts the imagery of the Rhine ode into the negative: today, a poet can only babble. "Pallaksch", which Celan puts in brackets, is a word Holderlin is said to have used with visitors during his madness. Christoph Theodor Schwab recounted in 1846 that Holderlin had answered questions with this word, which meant both "yes" and "no". But for Kurtag it is more of a curse. Celan gives it to a person who, by no means mad, is surrounded by the divine aura of the "shining beard of the Patriarchs" ["Lichtbart der Patriarchen"]. Kurtag wants the word "Pallaksch" to be sung in a fortissimo of "extreme rage and desperation", then "almost shouting" and finally pianissimo, "suddenly fleeting", in this way compressing the greatest agitation and resignation into the smallest possible space. Holderlin's madness reveals itself as the madness of our time, about which there can be no poetry, only babbling. It is from this that the Holderlin settings derive their timeliness, uncompromising stringency and matchless radicalness. The impression of interiority, almost autism, evoked by the textless melismas - recalling the voices heard by schizophrenics and the endless pacing and mumbling of the crazed poet - thus become a judgement on the present-day world. This is Kurtag's most radical verdict on contemporary life to date. At the same time, he interprets "Kame, ka-me ein Mensch..." ("Should, should a man come..."), marked "Arioso, molto largamente", with profound intimacy, as if he knew both Celan's original version of the poem -"Should, should a child come into the world, today..."- and the Messianic hope expressed by this invocation. From here

(4) Heikel Bartel, "Dimensions of Parody in the Poems of Paul Celan"in Beate Müller (ed), Parody Dimensions and Perspectives on Modern Literature, (Amsterdam-Atlanta, GA, Rodolpi, 1997), pp. 19-20.


Pictures from, Paulo Quintela, Hölderlin, (Porto, Editorial Inova LDA, 1971).

***

Tübingen, Jänner

Zur Blindheit über
redete Augen.
Ihre - ‘ein
Rätsel ist Rein-
entsprungenes’–, ihre
Erinnerung an
schwimmende Hölderlintürme, möwen-
umschwirrt.

Besuche ertrunkener Schreiner bei
diesen
tauchenden Worten:

Käme,
käme ein Mensch,
käme ein Mensch zur Welt, heute, mit
dem Lichtbart der
Patriarchen: er dürfte,
spräch er von dieser
Zeit, er
dürfte
nur lallen und lallen,
immer-, immerzuzu.

(‘Pallaksch. Pallaksch.’)

P. Celan, in John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, (New York - London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) p. 158.


Tübingen, January


Eyes talked into
Blindness.

Their - 'a riddle, what is pure-
ly arisen' -, their
memory of
floating Hölderlintowers, gull-
enswirled.

Visits of drowned joiners to
These
Plunging words:

Came, if there
Came a man,
Came a man to the world, today, with
The patriarchs’
Light-beard: he could,
If he spoke of this
Time, he
Could
Only babble and babble,
Ever- ever-
Moremore.

(“Pallaksh. Pallaksh.”)

Translated by John Felstiner, Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, (New York - London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) p. 159.

Tübingen, January

Eyes talked into
Blindness.
Their – “an enigma is
the purely originated” – their
memory of
Hölderlin towers afloat, circled
by whirring gulls.

Visits of drowned joiners to
these
submerging words.

Should,
Should a man come into the world, today, with
the shining beard of the
patriarchs: he could
if he spooke of this
time,
could
only babble and babble
over, over
again again.

(“Pallaksh. Pallaksh.”)

Translated by Michael Hamburger - who has translated both Hölderlin and Celan, says “Celan can be seen as continuing a line of development in German poetry that runs from Klopstock and Hölderlin in the eighteenth century to the later Rilke and Georg Trakl.”Michael Hamburger, Poems Paul Celan,(New York, Persea, 1988), p. 177

Tübingen, Janeiro

Olhos con-
vertidos à cegueira.
A sua -- "são
um enigma as puras
origens" --, a sua
memória de
torres de Hölderlin flutuando no esvoaçar
de gaivotas.

Marceneiros afogados visitando
estas
palavras a afundarem-se:

Se viesse,
se viesse um homem,
se viesse um homem ao mundo, hoje, com
a barba de luz dos
patriarcas: só poderia,
se falasse deste
tempo, só
poderia
balbuciar balbuciar
sempre, sempre,
só só

("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")

Paul Celan, tradução de João Barrento e Y.K. Centeno in Sete Rosas Mais Tarde, Antologia Poética, (Edições Cotovia, Lisboa, 1996)

Tournez, tournez ...

Chevaux de bois

Tournez, tournez, bons chevaux de bois,
Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,
Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,
Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.

Le gros soldat, la plus grosse bonne
Sont sur vos dos comme dans leur chambre,
Car en ce jour au bois de la Cambre
Les maîtres sont tous deux en personne.

Tournez, tournez, chevaux de leur cœur,
Tandis qu'autour de tous vos tournois
Clignote l'œil du filou sournois,
Tournez au son du piston vainqueur.

C'est ravissant comme ça vous saoule
D'aller ainsi dans ce cirque bête :
Bien dans le ventre et mal dans la tête,
Du mal en masse et du bien en foule.

Tournez, tournez sans qu'il soit besoin
D'user jamais de nuls éperons
Pour commander à vos galops ronds,
Tournez, tournez, sans espoir de foin.

Et dépêchez, chevaux de leur âme
Déjà voici que la nuit qui tombe
Va réunir pigeon et colombe
Loin de la foire et loin de madame.

Tournez, tournez! le ciel en velours
D'astres en or se vêt lentement.
Voici partir l'amante et l'amant.
Tournez au son joyeux des tambours!


Verlaine, Champ de foire de Saint-Gilles, août 1872.

( Romances sans paroles, 1874)

Rainy days

La pluie est le mot de passe de ceux qui ont le goût pour une certaine suspension du monde. Dire que l’on aime la pluie, c’est affirmer une différence.

(...)

La pluie confirme mes sentiments. Certains amours ne lui ont pas résisté; leurs couleurs mal fixées ont été délavées. La pluie agit tel le révélateur du photographe qui, sous la lumière rouge, porte l'image à la vie. Elle achève la cristallisation.
(...)
La pluie est le dernier moyen que la Nature a trouvé pour se manifester dans nos villes. Le chêne n'enjambe pas les buildings, le caribou se ferait écraser sur l'autoroute et la cigogne désespère de construire son nid sur les poteaux électriques. La pluie est l'ambassadrice du végétal, de l'animal et du minéral auprès de notre civilisation ; elle défend leurs intérêts et, si les offenses se font trop importantes, les venge.
(...)
La pluie accompagne la gravitation, et la dessine. La chute est, au même titre que la fractale, une forme que l'on trouve partout dans la nature. Il suffit d'observer: de nos dents de lait à la pomme de Newton, tout tombe.
Un jour, les astrophysiciens découvriront l'évidence: la pluie, en tombant sur la Terre, la pousse et la fait tourner. Elle est responsable de la rotation du globe terrestre sur lui-même et autour du Soleil.


Martin Page, De la Pluie, (Ramsay, 2007),pp. 15,17, 79.