ski sauvage
there's a cabin on a mountain. the sky's
foam gives the mountain a cool, transparent
atmosphere. the air around the mountain is
sonorous, pious, legendary, prohibited. the
entrance to the mountain is prohibited. the
mountain has its place in the soul. it's the
horizon of something and it retreats
ceaselessly. it gives the sensation of an
eternal horizon . . . and I describe that
painting with tears, because the painting
strikes my heart. it feels how my thought
unfurls across the painting, a space that's
ideal, absolute, but in a space with a form
that could be incorporated into reality.
there I fall out of the sky . . .
--Artaud
the black line (more abrupt) is the one that ruptures our
equilibrium with those skips that cause us to deviate from
continuity. you preferred the red one. because, like me, it
was a river of blood that's feared--it can wash you away. it
allowed us to keep going along above our boots toward a
tenuous slope--to glide and pretend--that we rupture the air
pockets with our lungs and that we open, with our bodies
incarnate, the illusion of a form. swift, across the immense
whiteness that turns purple-blue with the desperation of the
after. after this love? after this ocean? after this metaphor?
to glide and to fall on the frothy snow, bathing ourselves in
light, in champagne, in red algae . . . we've suffered so much
from wanting to open up the line at the edge of the object, the
feeling, the word, the border. the border of nature is black
and we'll brain ourselves in an attempt to cross it (the skies
where we used to commit suicide in reverse, toward infinity,
against gravity). the bloodstained hills under the snowy peak
that cut into my left leg when I scraped against it and I, rather
than suffering from the wound, describe its pain (aesthetics)
of disaster. against all protection--unprotected--looking in
the mirror at the fissure from which I bleed, first sniffing,
touching the bubble that appears and later, from that
complicit height, to always watch the body, shrunken and
dark from the act in which we've participated as an incident,
not as a choice. of the different lines of escape, we've taken
one as a way--not as an end--and this red, lyric line allows us
to concentrate our sensations in the structure of a feeling, to
throb with the explosion of a word (wrapper) that encloses
and protects our desire. the poesis of this watery line allows
me to pretend that this human landscape is one of snow. and
it's inside. without the difference of the (my) intermediary, I
assume it as an (I). but I'm tired of the drawing and I throw
it away (the boot bucks and drops its binding and I don't fall).
does a difference exist, or is the self in the difference? that's
how I can repeat the fall incessantly. but the space comes and
goes. does the writing move away from itself (the motion of
the stroke enters the very motion of the text), from life? the
difference is choice. the difference doesn't exist at the center
(each thing is the same thing). the difference is peripheral
and I like to wander, to split those oblique borders that seem
to determine some structure of feeling between these trails of
complexity that the artist chooses for his blue, his green, his
black gravity. the trails aren't in the context, they just
mediate the interior and the white surface of the mountain
(his page). Mont Blanc as end and death. and the metaphor
(paperweight with snow made from blanched wheat that
whirls around without melting) is the real fiction. every man
is alone in his determination. and this is nothing more than
the tone that assaults him when he makes a choice in time.
not in space, his space, which is instant and repetition. we've
sensed it at different heights (the yellow espeletia seem like
forests, as we court the shadows of the trees). over the
appearance of this reality, a fixity: we're imprisoned between
the gray air of the paperweight, its green pines, and the
border that is the sky and is made of glass. from here, the
fable: the sentence constructed to save ourselves from not
coming back from the black hole, its dark line, the most
dangerous point of escape. (my feminine discourse is syntax;
the stapling of the tapestry in which I capture the night). the
bell sounds its last peal with horror, it opens and that's my
fatal moment to intervene, to glide, frightened (to create
inside us spaces for life, spaces that didn't exist, that didn't
seem to be able to find a location in space). you were
expecting a story. dare to discern whether you've ridden on a
ski sauvage, between the leisure and the soft caress with
streaks of the obscenity that is writing.
-- Translated by
Kristin Dykstra and Nancy Gates Madsen
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