i
What today’s sky says is equal to today’s sky. Can anyone hear it?
Everywhere the white trees of spring, in the sun hazy, like a fever.
A sudden image or sensation – and so what if it is common, provided that it emerges, pierces the calm, cottony texture of day.
The light does not reveal things as they are. It dresses them, clothes them, so that they can be seen. Without this costume, they wouldn’t be visible. But they are not this costume.
The wind pushes the wind. The water moistens the water. When the raindrop meets the puddle and crashes there, glistening, how does the water greet it?
Rain is a thought by which the world thinks itself – world. One of water’s many thoughts.
What happens when a stone is smashed, when the being, long rigid, in the stone bursts into fragments? What kind of violence is wrought, subterranean and deaf, and upon what?
Everything that touches or touches itself… The rain which falls on the ground, the wind which slips along a rooftop and blows the smoke horizontal, the bird which lands briefly on the branch and clings to it…
The universal touch restores being, while preserving what is continuous in scattered reality.
The world doesn’t “say” anything, undoubtedly. Doesn’t actually speak. – Yet where does this sign come from that the world sometimes appears to send us, empty and without content? It is like a sign which is both perceptible and yet has not occured…
The treetop swaying in the wind encloses a kind of call in its slow movements, inseparable, as call, from the fact that it is and is nothing other than a treetop swaying in the wind.
Our most profound thoughts should only be drawn from earth and water, from clouds and wind… We should only express in images drawn from such sources as these.
That is what poetry would be, if it hadn’t become known as poetry.
The stream in the grass made a damp sound that expresses, when heard, something that was said before it was heard.
There is a bee buzzing about, a bright yellow thought whose large petals flap in the wind, in the stone basin. And me who says both. Just now.
The huge dark cloud, with the radiant outline, which hangs over the blossoming pear tree: blazing threat or glory?
Divine is the slight wave of wind through the roses. Living and divine.
What’s the use of describing the golden evening light on the rooftops, on the tree trunks? It expresses nothing but itself – it expresses nothing of itself.
The gentle powder which spreads in the springtime doesn’t know itself but senses itself, surely senses itself. Assuming it really is it which spreads.
Does the world, perhaps, want to speak, in spite of everything? Can it, perhaps, just want-to-say, but does it really want to? We alone speak. But surely not what it wants to say, if it actually wants to say anything at all.
The blossoming prune tree traces an image of the tree which, for a time, is not the tree, but you might say its breath.
The rest of the world came, briefly, to inhabit the rosebush.
When you look away or step aside, between the trees there is a kind of exchange, from tree to tree. And the roses appear to love one another.
Everything which is sign or wonder happens as though before it occurred. Admirably precedes itself.
The orange moon rises in the sky like a fascinated eye, rises to the degree of its fixed ecstacy. Slowly growing paler until turning white and somewhat haggard, at the height of its trajectory.
Insistent trace of a dream which has been forgotten, but which endures, like a slight happiness, all morning.
What is the song of this bird, that expresses a calm, sure trait, like a nectar?
The wind in the tall firs is an impenetrable thought. Self-Evident and impenetrable.
Almost everything that happens is preceded. But we don’t know how to see this.
Corresponding to today’s brooding sky, to the grey clouds, to the wind. In harmony which isn’t only thought, but a harmony no more, no less, with the sky, the wind, as sky and as wind.
Sometimes it is better to look at the countryside framed by a window, in order to see it without recognizing it. To see it.
When you know or think you know why a cricket sings, you no longer hear the cricket. At least not as it should be heard – like it was actually heard when you didn’t realize you were listening.
The evening’s dark is blue. The blackbird’s song corresponds to it in the heights. The song expresses blue space. The song is blue, space bird.
One should know enough not to turn on the light in a room when day fades. The world changes, the room too. Even oneself.
Gusts of wind in the chimney. High silky sound, deep. Supple and thundering.
Night doesn’t reveal itself, being night, it merely lets itself breathe.
Song of the cuckoo: only two notes, but clear, everything is in the distance between them, where the cool space rules the woods’ depths.
Again the white prune trees… The wonderful thing about them is that the little flowers blossom emphasizing only the fine veins of the tree, while the leafless branches remain visible, burst forth strong and black like a terrestrial body deep in this snowy web.
The storm comes. You stay indoors. The garden is handed over, vegetables and flowers, to the falling rain.
Everything happens at the same time, without hierarchy.
The endless debris… Not the sad waste, the beautiful debris which is the wear of time: stones or fragments fallen from walls, tree bark, rotting fruit, dead birds.
The young tree is sometimes like a body. It has the élan, the supple force – but rigid and gnarled within it, set. Smooth motionless élan, voluptuous but cold. Forced to be restrained.
The countryside comes to a standstill at night. Nothing more.
Letting the world come into view, like odours and sounds come to us. Letting it approach, in its image. Settling on the eye.
No being, it is so humble, is aware of its wealth which comes from seeing the world as only it sees it.
Everything happens outside of us, in an endless powerful, yet tranquil, deflagration which exceeds the approach of our senses, insofar as, in order to experience it, one must combine their separated powers (sight, touch, feeling, hearing…) – gather them all into one.
The sense is given there, in this blend of leaves, fruits, cracked grey branches, with, between them, these pink holes in the twilight. The mind vacillates, wandering into this mottled continuum, vanishes there, but finally relaxes, content…
Across the crossing, the night was soft blue, clearly lit by a half-moon, in a calm sky. Having woken-up well before dawn, I kept my eyes open until morning. And that night, which kept me company almost like a real being, accompanied me all day with its blue presence, in which a naked star calmly drifted.
Nothing specific draws my attention. Nothing speaks. Everything is, but nothing speaks. Even the swallow in its cry doesn’t speak. Being is silence.
To write is to translate to the best of one’s abilities into one’s own language an original unknown.
The world also invites one to say nothing, do nothing, attempt nothing, understand nothing. Or to understand, at least from time to time, that it’s better to understand nothing.
Do I seek my thought or do I seek words? Seeking my thought, I basically only find words. And everything happens as if I had found my thought when I have found the words.
What wants to be written, who speaks through me, though it is almost without me? Speaks against me? Perhaps. To be decided by me. Brought to light, declared. What is said, forced in short, perhaps iminges upon the one who says it.
Desiring only to resound, from time to time.
One can only speak by describing: that’s the way it is, that’s what it is. But actually, being like this, being that, it isn’t like this, it isn’t that. The slight gap between like this and like this, between that and that creates reality.
So just, so plenary is writing, it could never claim that a single thing exists.
You add to what I say when I speak, and prolong it – simply by hearing it.
Thinking, when I write, that I am already writing in a dead language.
I want this thought to fit into a sentence: it must be possible.
Poetry, like an surge which arouses words almost purely as words, even beyond their meaning: a wave. This single wave already reunites with one knows not what golden swelter in things, what blissful island…
A poem should precede its meaning.
Don’t let speak what would like to speak today. There are voices that it is better to silence, when they have no song.
What is this cheerfulness which comes to us, when we succeed in naming? When we have found the right word? Who repays us then and with what?
Nothing becomes solely word, loses or disappears upon becoming word, if the word which expresses it, in that it does not become lost as word. Thus the true word which expresses the wind, is borne by the wind.
Writing in the same way in which everything is done: like a loss.
Dying, I shall perhaps carry a bit of the world – if I had said so, and for what I would have said.
A true book ends where it begins.
One only really talks about what one doesn’t possess. Otherwise one would live it, one wouldn’t talk about it.
What I say here, reader, actually only comes to an end in your reading, as what I intended to say.
ii
It’s always the Same fatally which occurs. And so nothing happens. Or this nothing that is the Same, in its differences.
If everything wasn’t the Same, nothing would cohere. Simply, the Same maintains itself through its differences, can only maintain itself as Same by averaging its differences.
We are on the level of differences, we are, with all beings, differences. Unable then, if we are truly its differences, of knowing the Same.
Thus we believe that something occurs.
Everything remains still as long as it is there. What actually changes remains still, as long as it changes there.
That which is sought, who will express it? who has ever known it? Knowing it would be realizing all knowledge.
Endlessly thought returns to the same centre. It is only a centre, where there is nothing, not even a point. A naked empty centre which is only a centre. But a centre.
It only reaches there to immediately bounce back, rejected as much as attracted by it.
You wouldn’t seek so much, if you could find it. For it isn’t like one can find it. One only finds, and easily when all is said and done, what isn’t it.
It is what causes us to seek. How are we to find what causes us seek?
What was named with the gods still remains, for the time being, nameless.
They all say the same thing, in order to try and equal Your silence!
The visible is only able to be seen. It is only visible. That’s where the invisible begins.
The festering invisible is even more obvious in broad daylight, in the suffocation of day.
If death wasn’t there, always insistent, would we know the invisible? Would there be any invisible?
Man only makes sense as he does due to God’s silence. What would happen if God spoke?
The truth only exists broken, unrecognizable, in all that is true.
The possible embraces the real, burdens it. And, mingling with it, strangely dilutes it, already makes it ephemeral.
Upon my death, as far as I’m concerned nothing will have occured. So what has occured before? And even, what has ever occurred, if it is like that for each and every one?
Youth tramples upon its destiny unconcerned. Without knowing that it is only its destiny which has been trampled so, by a carefree step.
Inhabited… This someone or something which is inside me yet isn’t me. Which however isn’t me except by being me. Which is only really me by being me without me.
I do what I want. But, by doing so, I only desire what makes me.
I don’t know my roots, nor must I know them. Roots are for the earth’s night and want this night. Laid bare, they die.
What kind of Desire encompasses all desires?
Just as there are animals and plants, who know without knowing, there are, perhaps, great things that we know without being aware of them.
True thought, it too precedes itself.
God doesn’t exist like the world exists… Obviously. – But then how does the world exist?
Thinking a thought which can rush into its course almost without encountering any obstacle. Dangerous perhaps, but undeniable too, at the rate of its dizzying flight.
Sense is in exodus, across all senses.
Because the world is world, we are not in the world. Otherwise the world would welcome us, if it was world.
Something before us has already been uttered. That’s where a saying springs from, hence its appropriateness. Nothing, in the visible, is without precedent.
Being only lasts while being, which obscures it.
All is obstacle, in being means.
A thing that I haven’t made is not nonexistent, is not nothing. It is a thing… that I haven’t made. The opposite of the possible.
An error is a reality. Like a lie, a false report, etc. What is its status, as reality?
We are not in the world for knowing the why, but to be there.
Man becomes in abandon. He becomes as this abandon.
The world, over which man believes he reigns, isn’t human, but less than human and more than human. Man has no place there. And so he doesn’t truly inhabit it, but only reigns, or believes he reigns, over it.
Man’s ingenuity seems to extend as far as God’s silence. God made man through his silence.
More than what he is, man is what he could be. This could-be ravages his being, and in the end prevents him from ever being what he could be.
The flower understands the world in flower and the bird in bird. Why can’t man understand it in man? Because he wants more: he wants to understand it…
I inhale the scent of the rose and it is the scent of something which is like the rose – not the rose itself.
Nature bustles about. No less active and incessant than man. Even its silence is busy, abundant.
Nature is an excess which organizes itself – as excess.
It is the finite Body, perhaps finitude itself, whose wave drowns us, in voluptuousness.
A naked woman reveals first a body and then a face. A naked man, first a face, then a body’s shame.
When I experience well-being, I am only with myself.
What is revealed and stands out is immediately powerless.
All true thought leads to vertigo, pulls the ground from under our feet. It doesn’t help living. But maybe dying.
Life is rarely lived. Is death more fully death?
Time arranges things, you might say, produces oblivion… No, it isn’t time: it is what lies at the bottom of time.
I have no recollection. Only memory.
All that has been persists, in some way. Otherwise it would never have been. But has it perhaps also never been?
Time’s moss, beautiful insidious lichens, on everything…
iii
All is forced to be one, having no other.
We don’t know whether we are born, just like we don’t know whether we are dead. What can really be known between?
Being the fullness of Something empty or perhaps the emptiness of Something full – which in us, accordingly, wants to be either empty or full.
There is a profusion of the visible and something like a kindness in this profusion. But we don’t see it.
One trips over something, even when everything appears open and passable. No doubt one trips.
Everything which endures is in a state of loss.
It is because the world of self thinks that it created thought. It created it so that we might speak – not to be thought.
The world as it is at any moment puts an end to the possible, fells the possible at any moment.
The pure real is unbearable. One can only be dependent upon it, one can’t help but be dependent upon it, to exist.
A departure which is nothing other than and continually only departure, without arrival. A departure which consumes itself…
The last glimmer of evening which comes to strike the pewter candelabra in the window is enough to prepare for death.
How can we find the answer to the question, if we ourselves are contained by the quesiton? For a question to be a question, it must be able to be asked absolutely, as if from outside.
The world is only acceptable and tolerable if it is a created world. It is also only unacceptable, intolerable, if it is a created world.
Fate, fatum, is what speaks to us.
One must know how to forget. Forgetting is often more real, more knowable in its night and in accordance with the night, than memory.
All is real and all is dream. At the same time.
History changes nothing in the world. It is added to the invisible.
All the innumerable colours on display, without ever equalling the sole nocturnal opulence.
The light basically hides the darkness. Perhaps shelters it in itself.
Mightn’t silence and peace only be the reverse of what death is?
If one could realize the loss of everything without suffering, what bliss!
Life goes by, always alongside, like a feverish breath.
You are suffering? No. Something is torn in the fabric of things. And it takes place inside of you.
There is only one world: this one. It is the most naked form of misfortune.
What speaks in the arid, in any place without beauty – when it speaks?
What is declared “out of service” knows, from then on, a kind of peaceful eternity.
Misfortune makes visible the painful invisible.
Every being overcome by sorrow, however ordinary in the normal course of our days, is thus great. Because hurt.
One seeks what warms the poor heart. Eagerly, one seeks. And one finds. Mercifully one finds.
Near the centre, the tiniest centre is poor, consumed life.
Water, formless, assumes all forms, is content with any of them.
Cemetery at noon. The grass growing over the dead has more silence.
I listen to what you don’t say.
Something watches, inspects and watches, continuously.
The Whole, in each of its parts, lovingly protects itself, you could say against itself.
Death hasn’t always been – strange notion. It only began with life, when life appeared. Before, it was only erosion and decline, in minerals and stars. But not strictly death.
Am I a living being? In respect to death and life I take the same forgetful distance. Far from death and life.
Was my nothingness before birth a nothingness? And my nothingness after death will it be another one? The same or different?
The dead man that I will be already exists, invisible, within me. It is that which has died so that I might be, in the living being that I am, like the living being that I am.
Put on perfume. Since your body already “smells” and to prevent its decomposition from spreading.
Dedicating to the dead dead feelings. What are they?
Let the great, the powerful, the fearsome bird come, which will instantly silence the deafening masses, scattered sparrows!
All these exhausted insects, belly up, facing the abyss of the sky, facing the definitive Open…
The leaf, in short, traverses the tree. You might say, it only exists to detach itself from it, in the golden twilight of its end.
Every defeat disappears into death and fades there. Victories, no.
Don’t confuse death with what it leaves behind: decay and ruin. Death cannot be thought nor even approached, starting from appearance. It enacts beyond effort its pure blinding work, foreign to all pus, absolutely clear.
Is death, perhaps inconsolable in being death?
Life longs, longs for itself, not knowing that it is life.
All ends are sad, even the end of what is sad, as end.
The trees’ leaves, long hardy, fall so that the tree too might know its transparency. In winter, it is inhabited only by the sky, and the clouds.
Le Lyaumont
May-August 1980
Roger Munier
L’ordre du jour, Fata Morgana, 1982