While the Gods Were Sleeping by Erwin Mortier

Author:Erwin Mortier [Erwin Mortier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782270850
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2014-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

I wait until death dawns in objects, the naked hour when things lose their leaves and all becomes leggy and dumb, not able to clothe themselves with the habits or meanings in which we usually drape them—as if a short moment of symbolic weightlessness occurs in which the world forgets its coherence and God Himself washes his hands of creation so that everything shudders, eye to eye with itself. I wonder: is everything we do or don’t do ever anything other than modulated desperation?

At noon everyone withdrew into the twilight of the house, which seemed to rise from the cellar, where the child lay on the cold slab. Up in her room my mother has the maid help her out of her corsets—and I hear her snort in her sleep, here, in the afternoon of this story.

I wanted to sleep and stay awake at the same time, mount guard over things with the pomposity of our waking consciousness, but also to allow myself to sink into slumber, which like a good father knows us better than we want to admit and always remains realistic.

The roar of the guns, in the east, in the north, towards the south, mounted, ebbed away again, regained strength, a dull pounding, like that of giant fists on a table top far away. Sweat crept over my crown, through my hair, and ran down over the corners of my eyes, down along my nostrils. The pigs were baking in their terracotta mud bath, the cats spied on the deathly quiet explosions of the light through the keyholes of their pupils.

Only in Van Gogh did I rediscover those noons. His unstable suns and the sloppy Milky Ways in his black vibrating nights; the unbearable darkness which frightened him so much that he riddled it with stars as bright as the scorching luxuriance of the eternal noon of his madness. He knew the madness of the cats, but could not find their sleep, so the demon devoured him.

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