Chronology of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

AS NIGHT CAME by, aunt Adriana would sit at the piano and play this slow melody
as if to hide a secret or cut an irreparable rose.’tis why darkness, when she stopped, thickened.

Ah! this beautiful mystery of solitude, the mystery of being two or, the great mystery of being All.

Nevertheless, after so long a time, only a dim memory lies, an old forgotten book
I will never see or read again.

And I felt I had this strange debt that someone may enter at anytime to claim.

Raindrops on the glass so illegible.

Privilege of misunderstanding.Â

I often thought beginning again.
I would need at least an
easy tranquile afternoon or
a train arriving on
schedule.

A mere carnal delight
of intimate theft would do.
A fioriture pick from Wilde’s
words would do fine too.

Then again, I prefer forgetfulness or
chat with the next-door carpenter who’s
passion for old alleys whispered sense,
and if dogs did not bark at night,
eternity would go unnoticed

With all my due respect for miscalculations
which saved my life all too often, I have to admit:
I have been an ideal patient.

One thing bothered me though, a tiny detail.
I could not see my pipe in the mirror.

No, no, no. I’m not absurd. It is because of this magic
of words of no particular meaning, that
this paradox of a journey would have no value

if it was reality

idiot©2003Â

How impolite of you to pass away without giving me a call. I could?ve joined the party.

PEOPLE SAID THAT YOU ARRIVED from the north, I never asked, I wanted you to tell me, though I did not care, never thought it vital. Your origins too, rumours had it you came from an eccentric family of well-born Europeans.
We met regularly for sixteen consecutive years in taverns and restaurants. Numerous meetings, glorious, lengthy and intense debates took place there, over well-chosen plates and red wine. Red wine and quality cigars were our sole elements of mutual agreement.
Facts and facets of our life, the imaginary, we have never lived, ideas in your hands mysteriously dispersed, as if you were elsewhere at the time of their use. This may be a reason that traumas failed upon you, simply because you were not there. You kept on coming back. The reason of our presence here, and how or when this world could change…I have to admit that I too was absent-minded ? of course, I have loved humanity ideals, still do, but those birds and bees flying further on, gained the most of me, my passion for colour too. Remember, I once said that as a kid I would abandon my ?expeditions? anytime to caress a wounded bird. Your answers were contradictory, you disagreed, and your uncompromised struggle for social awareness was above all. I disagreed/agreed. Furious debates were then to follow, remember?

I?ll probably seek you in future centuries.

Years at night are digested behind monstrous buildings. The glow of poesis high ups the universe. You, an eternal lodger of a city who sells or rents many a soul. Among other, I would try to convince you (I, you?) What is the point, being off to a struggle again and again? Let us say you win. You would be victorious, okay, victorious against whom. Aah you see, you were so passionate (and an idiot too) that you would re-enter the battle if given the chance. Losing your breath. You would then round-up your ruins or whatever?s left of you, and gaze dreaming to the insubordinate sea ? yes, the gaze of the poet, trapped. Others too, gifted, as yourself, sensitive and defenceless to insults, lived unaware, a spiritual drama, the drama of their time. Their writings, a powerful document. Your diary, a personal matter of mine.

Worshiping cries of slaughtered chimera.

Your obscure, undefined ideal, may be thought pretentious ? sometimes it was ? in general though, your delicate relation with this ideal of Light, and your genuine latent desire to please. Your painstaking effort for seeing a simple aesthetic result, through a contribution to society, was entirely admirable. Your only reward. You had dialectical materialism on one hand, Thomas Mann on the other, this marriage was not contradictory through your sayings and writings, especially your sayings. Once you even read us Novalis, a poet so out of your philosophical sphere. No, you had Novalis next to ?Das Kapital?? I was furious seeing these opposites ? not clashing ? but harmoniously justified through your ?lectures? to many, especially to me. Many a times I have accused you of being aesthetically troubled. I have yet to regret my verbal hostility (I envied you, a little).

Numerous pages of words never written, snow from old fairy tales.

A fighter against the output of rubbish. I did question your flexibility of perspective, as perspective is vital to me, ?twas how I constantly urged you, as to never lose your belief in the social possibilties of your poetry, since this was you. I could not, cannot follow, as my temperament differs. I am another sort of weakling, a coward. I, who lived a life of confusion, vague like a dream one forgets in the morning and remembers again, till one thinks, was it a dream or destiny? Then I would see open windows, as great books of isolation, reading the never and the nothing, I had an obligation, from this never and this nothing to create space for my canvases. Do you recall those nights, we would here desperate cries for help from the past?exactly, we had never lived it. And there is nothing within these walls that ever thinks of you*

©idiot

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*Jules Supervielle:- from: EN PAYS ETRANGER
translation James Kirkup. Editions New Direction

From the Book “Facets of Friendship”Â