| THE MEGAPHONES OF PRAGUE (1996-) texts by louis armand THE LARGE IRISES (1996) spring brought you the hideous laughter of the idiot ... the golem of narcissism- its voice of inner fear driving each man & woman toward some private atrocity, like playing cards before the wind i have not yet closed her eyes but she will not see me again-- she says: i am & i am dead (her ghost silently across the old square like the shadow of a sundial ...) our lady of the flowers ... on her death bed, barely conscious & already incapable of memory (in her eyes she has already become a substitute for nothing) so that i have begun to prepare myself knowing that she will never again be able to recognise me ... from the interior of her delirium a summons or entreaty: they will scatter my ashes on the river i am dead already with my skeleton beneath the river-- words like time & voice of ... echoes underwater you will never know if her voice was ever more than a figment of your desire: "there, over there, in the distant past a lost memory of what is no longer here (was it ever?)" funeral rites beneath the silent vigil of black flowers: their mouths give you darkness for admonishment that i will begin & end by loving you in my private language deprived of you something in your voice that hesitates, rendered up to those known or unknown who will have given it to you in advance the absence you avow in your voice & every word a kind of perjury (what it could mean to be responsible for history? invoking it against everything that represents silence (as one who is afraid of dying before the end of a long sentence ...)) her voice seemed to carry distance within itself, like something enforced or imposed anonymously (a list of all your lovers, orphans sentenced to death or exile) words that left your mouth only to become unrecognisable ... meaningless against the vltava she coils herself up-- coiling invention of desired flesh ... to lie down by the riverbed, tell the currents a rumour about your death after the spring rain when the river breaks her banks like an excess of suffering in mute tones she spoke: i am the silence before revelation & when i am made to sleepwalk through your rivered silences as if to say: je m'�tais �coul� at the moment when a flower opens up, unpetals beneath your gaze & you hasten to climax-- consecrate another death as if i loved only your memory & confession of these crimes-- insisting that someday i must come to recognise i want to kill myself as a phrase belonging to me ... what will have echoed from all those other mouths through which hatred effaces itself? or that its voice avows only the on--going destruction of which it remains an almost silent monument ... before everything, before every determinable architecture there is the geometry of the flower les silences s'�panouissent comme les fleurs du mal the word blossoms far from its centre, from the secrets it has kept there: that place of nothing "... one day i shall collapse, dead beneath your flowers. since it's my tomb you're preparing ..." the river conjures its gloom- prague, her funeral & unrequited love strewn with bouquets of black flowers ... (an image of a russian tank raising its glistening phallus in front of her, in front of the flowers, in front of nothing) already an apocalypse: herself the negation of herself? as though its reflection had said: your mouth is a dead woman's whose eyes are of roses or like a whore's tumescent mouth resembling those mortuary wreaths that are hung in winter on cemetery walls "this snow on my page, in my silent prison: the dread of it, the dead among the violet blossoms, death with her cocks!" i no longer know whether they are women these hyacinths so much so that in the evening on my knees i encircle their legs with my arms mouth searching out the hidden verb ... winter is always approaching ... passing the stone saints & martyrs on charles bridge ... banal as stage props: an opera don giovanni--- afterwards heads rolling down the steps of the national theatre; a red-carpet affair ... seized by the strange harmonies & lost again & seized ... she saws the yellow bells flashing in the bell towers--& in each tower, her heart hung, tolling ... the sky over the houses & the river, pale green, livid ... she laughs herself into a sick & lonely fear ... "... & her quietus is to render thee" when the actor's memory fails & you loose your map of the world--- each cell reduced to its hunger wall ... the mirror tells you nothing. nor the river flowing out of foreign cities (& those who suffered there). you say: i am the ghetto in which i walk & you see in the hollow of that face eyes like yours as they were in the beginning (before the hunger that dulled them; the hunger known to all men: to draw blood from stone, moving dry bones to desire flesh, loins, & a will to curb justice) ... in the monologue of time ... when you heard finitude sing-- yourself fluttering above the consonants ... a name died on your tongue (taste of ash): ... as though she had become the locus of redemption & sole cause of human suffering ... the unappeased & spent hunger of the fugitive body-- to regret everything it has learnt to forsake & so become the last syllable in a catastrophe of noise ... what is she, the peril of enclosed (space)? a voice? flesh already a tributary of scars, & she is splitting open--whole alphabets pour out of her, guilty, escape ... she is waiting for something ineffable to absolve her of history ... in the old square hollow laughter of ghosts & the face of a clock tower worn clear of its numbers useless hands loose from their arbitrary coils of black wires (at another time the sound of tensile wires snapping in the frozen stillness of air might have signified an end to suffering ...) from the edifice of the real falling in a web of sudden geometries ... someone spoke & said a crowd had gathered in the square to read the deathlists ... & she cried out suddenly: the war will never end ... (hands rushing up to her throat in a medici venus gesture) it is almost silent now. the dogs asleep. only the loose pages of a newspaper- caught flapping like a wounded bird in a wire fence-makes a sound. beyond the perimeter a shadows stoops to the water. a bridge. vertical lines of streetlights reflected where the river turns from the city--& the last immemorial plaques of autumn leaves born to destinations far off in the unconscious ... � louis armand, 1996 |
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