The Garment & The Empty Wardrobe

2003-08-05T13:26:00.000+01:00

Send me your trial.

2003-08-05T13:24:00.000+01:00

Convulsions of panic, like those witnessed at the Last Supper, set in as the weather report unfurls from the grey broadsheet. A terrible lament towards exhaustion – unable to elope, one can only erode. In the desert, there is no rain. But in the office there is a respite available only to those who have the misfortune of actually working: but one can nevertheless be a tourist of the office, a voyant of the bureaucracy. In the least, theirs is an air-conditioning network otherwise hidden in the world of the flâneur. In the heat, all falls prey to a sense of impuissance and fatigue. Salivating for satiation, collapse takes precedence: the glands sigh, the brow furrows, sleep prevails, all glides into the coma.

But you dance, you laugh, you elope! How excited you become as the sun proves its prowess! Did you think she’d been clothing it in drapes of velvet? Piffle.

But still, blow me a flower and I’ll bake it for you: draw your curtains and I’ll paint you as you read.

2003-08-03T12:04:00.000+01:00

That was that, this is now: you should have seen me sleep, should have seen me dream. My dark glasses, perched on my hive of hair, my pipe dangling from my lip, I startled the curtain rail whilst peering into the bachelors window. What a night I had! I actually had to hide from myself. A little silence gave way to dissolution; a little speck of night gave way to clarity. And now – all is turned to grey. In London there is a heat-wave that won’t be quenched by my self-propelled fan nor will its malign rays be refracted by my alcove of blackened mirrors. But I can see that you don’t know what misery means! Grouched in your lotions and ice packs! You will flock to the ponds of the parks and parade in melodious chants of gaiety, not a care in the world!

Who am I to argue? Perhaps I shall even follow.

On the whole, Tomas Venclova is not someone I care to know – I don’t even know him! Originally, he was a Lithuanian poet – this much we can know: but to me, to him – an abyss. I don’t even know him and so can’t offer a thought or two. It is all unknown. Not even happened.

Boredom, fatigue, sloth, vulgarity, ennui, pestilence: I have consigned myself to the position of historian of the exhausted, the perennial and the pendulous. Nothing has altered: we are not archaeologists; we are looters of the disused. In the cupboard are stored piles of Prozac boxes, latent like the remains of the Prussian empire – you think I’ll use them! I’d rather be consumed by own gluttony – bloated by despair. Nothing has altered: what gave rise to Buddha but accidie; what gives rise to Pascal but sexual perversion; Augustine too – what a sorcerer of the licentious!

God is dead, long live voyeurism!

2003-08-02T21:38:00.000+01:00

Torn into the virulence of decay and weary of the symmetrical tone of disgust, the virtues of atrocity must suffice. How is it in existence? That is the question I asked myself last night as the elderflower fell on my head. Purity and chastity are commands of philanthropy: the farm must be overturned! Machines left spinning in absence of their masters, cows whose boredom has led them to devour their offspring, pots and kettles still simmering on the black hob, an emaciated labourer chanting a threnody as the soil unearths itself, Prometheus returns to extinguish the flames, a maid with legs astride, her brown pubic hair shimmering in the rain, reclining in exhaustive lassitude whilst fingering her lapels, elsewhere pigs chortling dogs, cats groaning with pride and a lion gnawing on harp strings: ruin!

2003-08-02T21:25:00.000+01:00

Spun like cotton, my verdomde self winces at the incipient spring dawn: febrile cavity! Vaughn-Williams bows majestically, his portentous brow erodes. No, weary and hibernated, unlike you, the anticipation of revival disgusts me – I am only happy when I am near an end. To this extent, only when existence is evoked as an irreversible, gradual and extended coda is it bearable for me, only when the Seasons are deemed as frustrated convulsion of resignation are they able to be illuminated by the scent of decay. Prefixed by mutability, I am infused with bliss. I consume my joys only when they have passed: festering beneath the Venetian façade, the lingering remembrance of a lament ignites like Vesuvius.

tomas_venclova@yahoo.co.uk