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Authors: Francis Ponge

BOOK: Mute Objects of Expression
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“I know my own self,” she muses. “If I simply let go, the slightest argument will turn tragic: I'll no longer know myself. I'll break into a frenzy: you disgust me, I don't recognize you anymore.”
“Pointed arguments are the only kind I know, insults, blows – the fatal thrust of the sword.”
“I'd rather not argue at all.”
“We're poles apart.”
“If I were ever to accept the slightest contact with people, if one
day I were constrained by sincerity, if I had to say what I think! . . . I'd take leave of my life along with my response – my sting.”
“So just leave me alone; I implore you: let's not argue. Leave me to my daily grind, and you to yours. To my sleepwalker's business, my inner life. Let's put off as long as possible any discussion . . .”
Whereupon she gets one slight tap – and falls instantly: nothing left to do but squash her.
Susceptible as well perhaps because of the very precious, all too precious, character of the cargo she bears: which
merits
her frenzy.
. . . Her awareness of its value.
But this stupor that can be her undoing (one tap of the hand and she falls to the ground) is also capable, if not of saving, then at least of curiously prolonging her life.
A wasp is so stupid – I mean no offense – that if cut in two, she goes on living. It takes her two days to realize that she's dead. She keeps on flailing about. Even more than before.
There you have the height of
preventive
stupefaction. Also the height of defiance.
Essaim.
Swarm:
exagmen
, from
ex agire
– to expel.
Frenetic perhaps because of the exiguity of her diaphragm.
(It is a known fact that for the Greeks thought resided in the diaphragm . . . and that the same word stood for both: ϕρην, to be precise.)
Why, of all insects, is the most active the sun-hued one?
Why, as well, are yellow-striped animals the most vicious?
The Wasp and Fruit
Transport of bruised pulp, ravaged, contaminated, mortified by the excessively brilliant golden-black, gypsy, Doña Juana.
Integrity lost through contact with an overly brilliant visitor. And not integrity alone – but the very quality of what remains.
Between birds and fruit there is none of this love-hatred, this passion. The flesh of fruit retains a lovely indifference when broached by a bird. There's indifference between them. The bird is but a physical agent.
Yet between insects and fruit, what profound effects, what chemistry,
what reactions! The wasp is a physio-chemical agent. She precipitates the post-maturation and decomposition of the vegetal flesh, which had imprisoned the seed.
The plum says, “If the sun jabs me with its rays, they gild my skin. If the wasp jabs me with its sting, it wounds my flesh.”
Forever burrowing into the nectarotheca – head pulsating, pumping away with fervor and thrusting hips.
A sort of syringe for ingurgitating nectar.
First the Blaze
That the wasp rises out of the earth – and so tremulous, so dangerous – is of no small significance to man, because he recognizes in this the perfection of what he attempts elsewhere, with his vast hangars, his airfields.
In those there's something like a blaze whose sparks spurt far with unforeseen trajectories.
They take off from their subterranean airports . . . Offensive, offending . . .
The word
dynamo
.
They spring up at times as though unable to control their motor.
. . . First the crackling blaze, sputtering, then the flights are carried out, long distance flights, with precipitate attacks from time to time, silent plunges into the fruit, whereby the wasp accomplishes her mission – that's to say her crime.
The Swarm of Exact Words, or Wasp Nest
Whoa! . . . This bothersome spurt out of the furrow, isn't this a seditious sect of the seed roused against the sower? Yes, their outrage first lands them back in his overalls.

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