Roaming planet

I took shape in the universe, and alighted here, on blue planet.
Have I been diverted by some misfortune, fooled by some illusion?
For in rest or in exaltation, emerge
other images, other feelings, other spaces, other impulses,
which bring to me the fugitive and moved perfumes of a remembered elsewhere.

I am seated astride here and elsewhere.
Everything here is stranger to me than elsewhere.
Here is submerged by clamours and amazements;
elsewhere is irrigated by friendship, scintillates from enthusiasm,
is shrouded in silence, and is patient ad infinitum.

Elsewhere and here are meeting in an intimate and secret haven.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Abandon

Henri Pourrat: The stupid beggar (The Treasury of the Tales. "Fairies")

Once upon a time there was a traveller passing through the mountain. As he wanted to take a shortcut, he left a footpath to take another one and so on. Finally, he did not really know which path to take.

He was walking on the pasture, in the middle of a heathland, when he saw an old man, a beggar, who was sitting on a stone and eating a piece of bread.

“- Tell me, my good man, if I'm still going by there, will I arrive at Le Monastier?
- Don't know, sir.
- Is that a path I see over there, towards these three trees?
- Don't know, sir.
- That seems well to be one. Then, where does it lead to?
- Don't know, sir.
- Don't know, don't know... But, well, you must know where you are, here? Yes, tell me, where are we?
- Don't know, sir.
- Well, my poor fellow, I believe one thing: that you are nothing but an animal, a stupid animal.
- That may be so, sir, but so stupid an animal I may be, I come from where it happened to be, I go where the wind leads me, and my way, I still haven't lost it.”

A traveller is running from a place to another one, following tracks. He knows where he comes from, where he goes, where he is, until the moment when, perhaps in a hurry, he takes a shortcut, gets lost in a labyrinth of paths without exit, and ends up wandering, at the mercy of his anxious look.

A beggar is eating and resting, quietly. His way is a point of space and time which does not leave any trace: here and now. Without other place than himself, without other time than the very moment, he never gets lost.

Lost in the interval of a starting place and a place of arrival, a past and a future, mislaid out of the “beaten tracks”, the traveller touches another world, another time but, too busy running after a knowledge which has escaped him, he sees there nothing but a dead end and makes there only one short stopover.

The one who knows follows tracks; if he deviates from his way, his knowledge, he falls into ignorance and fright; then his search starts.

The one who does not know roams; without anything to seek, without asking, without feeling the least tension which would order a search, driven by a desire without object, not even a desire to be, he walks on like an adventurer without adventures, abandoned to here and now.