Planus by Blaise Cendrars

Author:Blaise Cendrars
Language: eng
Format: epub

One cannot speak of these things, bringing well-known people into my story, without at once taking on the air of a Pharisee! However, that is not my role. I am not comparing myself to others. If I have introduced the names of certain of my contemporaries and given them a merely passing role which has not pleased them, it is because contemporaries are public figures and, as such, part of the climate of the times.

It is not my ambition to write, but to live. I have lived. Now I write. But I am not a Pharisee who beats his breast because he puts himself into a book. I put myself there along with the others and by the same right as the others. A book is also life. I am just a clot. And life goes on. And life starts all over again. And life carries everything along with it. I should like to know who I am. . . .

Adrift at sea, I often asked myself: if I put the sea into a bottle, is it still the sea or is it just a bottle of dirty water? Putting life into a coffin — is that death? No, it isn't, is it? A thousand times no! It is a redoubling of life, an explosion, a blinding flash, a teeming of such vehemence that, if the marble cracks under the internal pressure and is exposed, split, scattered, and disappears into anony­mity, then bundles of verse are unguent-bearers, phosphorescent pills, pemmican for the atheistic explorer, millions of polar years (the pole-star changes every 26,920 years!). The Thing is not the Faith, and religious Observances are not Salvation. Consider Teeth : alive, they masticate, and dead — they bare themselves. And that is Laughter. It is God. It is Life. It is Grimace. It is not Condemna­tion, but one more chance. . . . Luck. Thank you for letting me try it. All is in all. And where does vice begin in one's conscience, or sin, sainthood, crime, innocence, fear, strength, guilt, glory ... or evasion?

Here, then, is my dirty linen : Second Deadly Sin : LUST (Fornicatio). According to the parable of the Evangelist: 'The first shall be last and the last first' (Mark x: 31). The last love is the same as the first, the same pure heart and tranquil soul", the same smile, but transfigured by a passion whose flame smoulders under the cinders after thirty years of conjugal life (when I was there!). The poet cried : 'I wrote my first poems out of youthful enthusiasm, my second out of love, and my last out of despair. The Muse entered my heart like a golden- tongued goddess, and fled from it like a pythoness, uttering cries of woe!' As for myself, the moment I met my latest love, it was the lightning-stroke, and I wrung the Muse's neck so as never to hear her cry out, whine and torment me. The pole-star of my life had shifted.

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