Just a few cable-lengths from my room, I was sometimes startled, my morning walk only just begun, by dissonant clashes of copper emerging from the demolition of a charming little brick house. Based on the chosen themes of that mysterious orphéon of ruins, I’d imagine behind that sad plaster façade a full procession of ingenuous morning arbors, where electricians in red overalls, blond streetwalkers at dawn, professional corteges in costume facing the rising sun dispersed nocturnal mists in a few of those finely wrought pewter tankards that look so lovely in the foreground of a comic-opera bacchanalia. Could anything more charming be imagined, before the morning rush to work in a uniform’s froggings and pleasing galaxies, than the choir fresh with dew, fanned by extinguished girandoles, and raised toward the sun by those ingenuous stagehands condemned, for the entire day, to hide like delinquents in the dustiest wings of a modern city? A hasty ball, the flight of a lace petticoat in twilight’s darkness was the limit of what I could imagine of the scandals behind that tiny enclosure hidden from land surveyors by the ordinary spring of a plaster curtain wall sure to be demolished in three strikes. But already a lovely tavern with uneven crossbeams was letting its shutters sing in dawn’s light, like the elytra of happy garden bugs unfolding in the morning. Already the street was warmly beckoning me, the misaligned cobbles taking their places in their cells—nothing, isn’t it so, had happened—and like a domino mask on a coquettish woman’s most seductive face, after their morning entrechat the streetlamps and rickety trash cans had resumed their collective watch under the military eye of the city’s sweepers.
Translated from the French by Alice Yang
"The poet is of no party." BaudelaireOur manifesto is an act of substantiation.
We reject all forms of futilitarianism, in whatever disguise.
We believe that comedy is the song of the village and tragedy the song of the goat.
We believe what is written in the books, but now we want to see for ourselves.
The single idea, beating on the same doors in vain.
The analogue and the invention.
The death cell.
The first permission.
Though we watch the stage for things to happen, though our minds wander.
By ourselves in the green field, playing our diversion.
Though the story begins with the loss of a home.
Out of the machine, we shift restlessly in our seats.