Snippets

[kaberett]

Junot Diaz:

You know how vampires have no reflections in the mirror? If you want to make a human being a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.

Tomas Tranströmer, various:

from Baltics (2)

A new breath of wind and the place lies desolate and silent again.
A new breath of wind, sighing about other shores.
It's about war.
It's about places where citizens are under control,
where their thoughts are made with emergency exits,
where a conversation between friends really becomes a test of what friendship means.

from Baltics (5)

July 30th. The strait has become eccentric--swarming with jellyfish to-

day for the first time in years, they pump themselves forward
calmly and patiently, they belong to the same line: Aurelia, they
drift like flowers after a sea burial, if you take them out of the wa-
ter their entire form vanishes, as when an indescribable truth is
lifted out of silence and formulated into an inert mass, but they
are untranslatable, they must stay in their own element.

August 2nd. Something wants to be said but the words don't agree.
Something which can't be said,
aphasia,
there are no words but perhaps a style...

Upright

In a moment of concentration I succeeded in catching the hen, I stood with it in my hands. Curiously, it did not feel properly alive: stiff, dry, an old white feather-trimmed women's hat, which cried out truths from 1912. Thunder hung in the air. From the wooden plank, a scent rose as when you open a photo album so aged that you can no longer identify the portraits.

I carried the hen into the enclosure and let her go. Suddenly she was very much alive, knew where she was, and ran according to the rules. The hen-yard is full of taboos. But the earth around is full of love and tenacity. A low stone wall half overgrown with greenery. As dusk falls the stones begin to gleam faintly with the hundred-year-old warmth of the hands that shaped them.

The winter has been hard, but now summer is here and the earth wants to have us upright. Free but wary, as when you stand up in a slim boat. A memory of Africa is wakened in me: on the shore at Chari, many boats, a very friendly atmosphere, the almost blue-black people with three parallel scars on each cheek (the Sara tribe). I am welcomed aboard--a canoe of dark wood. It is surprisingly rickety, even when I squat. A balancing act. If the heart lies on the left side you must incline your head a little to the right, nothing in the pockets, no large gestures, all rhetoric must be left behind. Just this: rhetoric is impossible here. The canoe glides out on the water.

from Romanesque Arches

Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete - that's how it's meant to be.