OF A TENDER HALF-MOON

 

 

That's the first word that kills; which one? The name of your first love. Well, the name is nothing, so to speak. Where is the rose? It's eternally there, in face of everything. The name itself is the rose, in fact. The rose of Homesickness, of Nostalgia, of Broken Homes, of the River of Impossible Desire...

 

I'm sitting here, thinking and dreaming of things eternal.

 

They are arriving ; they are of nowhere, but of somewhere, anyhow. One thing I do know: they are soulful. The word soulful is really dead in this world. We are all lost souls, forever dying from day to day.

 

We are constantly searching for the lost river of days past, of hours bygone, of castles forbidden, of leaves befallen, and of a thousand years intangible. Lo, everything we've been searching for is already there, within our reach. We've created our fate and our fortune; we don't know that to be intensely alive is just a matter of instantly dying, dying to our cherished life, dying to our marvelous imagination, dying to our beloved hankerings and wonderful yearnings, dying to all childlike dreams and far-fetched summers, dying to all blossoms of unrequited loves, of the first autumn of the holy year.

 

This year is the first year of my coming back to the world, the earth of mellow fruit, of sap evergreen, which is another way of uttering the unutterable...

 

I don't know who I am. A ghost of haunted mansions, a devil that is returning to this life to revisit his old corners, or a god that's forever condemned to retake his own counter-being in order to recapture what he couldn't swallow in his past lives. I don't know.

 

One thing I do know is that I'm dying, dying to the sun that is always rising every day in the hush of Eternity, of the sour moon that is always harassing my soul with all her empty frustrations, of the star, the unique star which will be there some day for the last light that never fails. Yes, everything will be there for a new tragedy of the world.

 

What's happening now? As usual, nothing happens. There's only the modicum of something which has taken place since ten thousand years, thousands and thousands of years of human and sub-human memory. The forgotten memory of the heart, of feelings unfiltered, of a tender half-moon, of many a dark street on the other side of the Imponderables.

 

I don't know what I'm doing now. There is nothing worth saying, nothing worth writing: all is a great lie, a wonderful hoax, a miraculous miracle of the sun, and of all the stars that ever existed in the cosmos.

 

They are always going somewhere; some looking for their own footsteps, others for dead seasons of their longings; and nobody is looking for his white mountaintop somewhere in the land of Nowhere.

 

Yes, death is the name of my first love.

 

You are born like a mosquito, a marvel of divine creation, a dying murmur of nights unspoken. Something of next nether mythologies...

 

Suddenly, one morning you discover that any word of the human language could kill you right away pitilessly, any trivial word of Sense and Meaning, of Order and Somewhere, of the End-all and Be-all of anything: you see that you are the last dream of your own invention, the first nightmare of unceasing Bliss, hardly awakened for the new Flaring Flame of forthcoming Darkness...