The Dark Mirror

Me? I pursue an image, no more.

--Nerval.

Prisoner of love

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-ko]

For a thousandth of a thousandth of a second I was free.

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I see it now, the fleeting world.

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There are some strange people in the world! Misfits, losers, tramps, ghosts in the sunlight, those who lived in the new world heartbroken but whose souls were formed by a forgotten life in a small town in eastern Europe, the ancient rhythms of sowing and reaping, sowing and reaping in the hinterland still felt in the pulse. Or maybe their words might follow the contours of speech, some unique shift in sounds, from an old fishing village song cycle found in no book. The last words their fathers spoke indelible..and then the blue sea. Even when they were sitting in a side-street cafe in New York, surrounded by flashing lights, the howling sirens from two blocks down, they could order a slice of soft, sponge cake (the image is Simic's) with gestures and words that marked them out.

"You're not from around here, are you?" asked the waitress. He couldn't smile properly and thought of the long trek back, past all those strange and discarded objects to the dark cellar of his home where he could work, unseen. "I must remember," he mumbled to himself, walking at a strange angle to the universe, with an unusual, jolting and uneven pace.

"I wish I hadn't been so reserved." The human heart, it is so infinitely curious. 

These people, out of time, in the wrong place, seem like kindred spirits. Walser and Pessoa, behind the grey, respectable suits, that lost look of resignation in their eyes, their remarkable acceptance of defeat (shikast) and the final awareness of the reality that time had passed them by, that they'd quietly grown old not knowing how to live. Why do they seek cramped spaces: a basement room, an office, a makeshift refuge? Why didn't they marry? 

Somewhere in the city were the objects and the people that were now isolated but that belonged to one another. What strange times we live in! The image of us, not now, but then, face to face. That was my metaphysics, my religion. Nothing but a variation of lost and found, nothing but a reversal of time. Me? I pursue an image, no more.