Mute Objects of Expression (19 page)

Around nine in the morning across the countryside near Aix, a threatening authority in the skies. Very deep hues. Less azure than petals of blue violets. Ashen azure. Tragic impression, almost funereal. Urns, statues of cherubs in certain gardens; fountains with masks and scrolls at some of the street corners deepens this impression, adding to its pathos. There are mute appeals to the sky to appear less closed, to release a few drops of rain into the urns for instance. No response. Magnificent.

In Aix, three mossy fountains glisten. The moss is scorched. The water sprays up only feebly. Glimmers there in gentle moving tresses.

Entire streets are lined with fine old houses of the judiciary. A stage setting for
The Litigants
. Resemblance between Aix and Caen. Almost like being in an annex of the Mazarine Library. The total absence of cars naturally enhances this illusion.

Decidedly, the most important thing on this trip was the fleeting vision of the Provence countryside at the place known as “The Three Pigeons” or “La Mounine” during the bus ride up from Marseille to Aix, between eight-thirty and nine in the morning (seven-thirty to eight, by the sun).

A countryside of gray vegetation, with a brilliant yellow-green forcing its way through nonetheless, beneath a sky of leaden blue (between periwinkle and pencil lead), with a threatening immobility, a threatening authority, with the urns, the statues of cherubs, the scrolled fountains on street corners, constituting the works,
signs, traces, proof, evidence, testaments, legacies, inheritance, the marks of man – and supplications to the sky.

In the background the distant sight of Berre and Martigues, with no sea view but a view of the large viaduct.

I must preserve this landscape, must dip it in lime-water (that is, isolate it not from the air of this place but
from time).

I mustn't let it spoil. I must keep it in broad daylight. To keep it I must first grasp it, collect all its hale and truly essential elements and tie them in a bouquet that can be held in hand – I must
comprehend
it.

(The painter Chabaud.) What struck me is the lavender-blue, the atmosphere's great “heaviness” (that's not the right word), so closed in on the landscape, grey and budding yellow-green. (More nitrogen than H or O?) So ashen, leaden: such a good foil for the delicate colors, like the painters' black mirror.

That already was impressive. But at the first apparition of statuary along the bus route (urn, cherub, or fountain), it became arresting, beautiful to the point of tears, tragic. So two stages: 1st: the landscape, 2nd: the statues.

Nothing more closely resembles night than this ashen-blue daylight. It's the daylight of death, the daylight of eternity. (Compare with my emotional response in Biot in 1924.) There is silence, but less a silence than stopped-up ears (eardrum suddenly convex? from change of pressure?). Drums muffled, trumpets muted, all of this naturally as in funeral marches. A veiled effulgence, a veiled splendor, a veiled glimmer, a veiled radiance.

What's strange is that this effulgence itself would be veiled by the excess of its own luster.

There's nothing more closely resembling night . . . That's going too far. Let's simply say: there's something of night in this sky, it evokes night, it's not all that different from night, it has an undertone of night, it has undertones of night, it has the same tones as night, it amounts to night. This daylight amounts to night, this ashen-blue daylight.

Just as a bursting sound deafens you, veils your eardrum and from that moment you don't hear it except as through layers of veils, of cork, of cotton – can it not be that an overly resplendent sun in an overly dry atmosphere might veil your eyes, whence an intervention of funerary veils? – No, not so. (I remember a dawn with my father at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon near King René's castle, a day when we had earlier taken my mother to the train station. I wasn't
yet ten. – That daylight amounts to night, that King René daylight. Perhaps it was the first time I had seen dawn. No, it was no longer dawn, but mid-morning. – But it didn't have this same overwhelming quality – overwhelming is too strong.)

(I'm also reminded of: “The blue shutter closed with a bang, there's daylight inside.”)

The sky is nothing but an immense blue-violet petal.

And everything beneath it, houses, roads, olive groves, green trees, varied enamel-yellow fields, all of it is like varicolored embers on the verge of dying out, on the verge of rekindling, like an ashy brazier if you blow on it: a few glimmers, almost phosphorescent, as though from an inner (secret) fire that sheds no light.

In some places ash, in others glowing coals (that's not quite it). We mustn't give these features of the landscape too much luster, lend them too much luster. No, the thing that was
above-all,
almost incomparably remarkable, was the ponderousness of lavender upon all this, through the branches particularly, etc.

Actually the landscape is gray, generally unremarkable, nobly notarized (?). It is the place, it is the land of Roman law, abstract, individual and social (??). (Lavender is the scent that best suits clean linen.)

Rose periwinkle touched with pencil lead
Holds its shadow diffused in its own effulgence
Its shadow diffused by its own effulgence
Shadow diffused within bodies
As death within the purest joy

This ashen-blue daylight amounts to night
Its shadow in its luster holds fast all diffused
Above Provence it gleams by day
an azure touched with pencil lead
Ashes in place of drops are scattered there
In place of imperceptible vapor imperceptible smoke
(but stable, unmoving)

 

In finest lattice the shades of darkness are suspended
A beautiful day is also a meteor
It holds all nature under the spell (the terror)
of its authority.
It holds all nature mute under its authority.
Every heart stops beating. (Only stupid June bugs and busses keep
on snorting and jostling.)