War by J.M.G. Le Clezio

Author:J.M.G. Le Clezio [J.M.G. Le Clézio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2013-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

Dear XX

I am writing to ask you just one more thing. I don’t know how to put it, and probably there isn’t any answer, anyhow, at least not a definite answer. I don’t know how to ask you this. I could ask you WHO AM I? of course, as though we were playing some children’s game. Or I could describe one of my dreams to you and ask you to analyse it. But that would not be the truth. I could compose a poem like the one I did the other day on a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen:

The infinitely flat earth, lake of mud, river, waveless sea, sky, sky of earth, blazing grasslands, road, grey asphalt road for cars to drive along.

Rooted.

Immovable.

There is just a single cry.

What does it say?

It says

I AM ALIVE

I AM

That’s what it says.

Faced with the immensity of time, with lake of mud, river, sky, road, always the same cry and it is not easy to hear what it is saying.

And it is not TO LIVE! TO LIVE! but perhaps

TO LOVE! or TO DIE!

From deep in the throat.

Faced with indifference, pool of dead water amid impassive vegetation, cold body between the sheets refusing with closed mouth and eyes

It hurls itself forward

Smashing its way

It is yet another cry

It says:

Slut! Filth! Trash!

Disgrace!

In the stifling black night, forests of sounds, vain dreams, world turned upside down preposterous shadow of the intelligible, mane growing inwards,

hairs that have already invaded throat and belly,

There is a light

the tip of a cigarette

the reflection from a storm-lantern

the eye of a cat

Straight rigid cry, hit, cat’s eye, gleam, droplet,

point, hole, tower, stone, word, noise, taste, skin,

being, being,

tigers, tigers,

ticks that I let loose upon you

demons that are my sentence of extermination for me, for you, for all,

to burst through the sky, the skin, indifference.

Ho! Ho! Houa! Houa!

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