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August 4 - August 5, 2020
Herbert will tell my fortune, from cards as tiny as a thumbnail, in two rows of five, but he doesn’t know how to read them because he can’t find the paper with the interpretations.
The coarse salt of the pretzels fills me with such glee I can’t express it.
Hard relate.
On the pond swims a membrane of ice.
When I looked out of the window, a raven was sitting with his head bowed in the rain, and didn’t move. Much later he was still sitting there, motionless and freezing and lonely and still wrapped in his raven’s thoughts. A brotherly feeling flashed through me and loneliness filled my breast.
Tonight I’ll be King of the house I break into next, and the house my castle.
The countryside’s so empty, and has the same forsaken sense for me as during that time in Egypt. If I actually make it, no one will know what this journey means.
One woman is blonde, the man has bad fingernails, the rest just snippets of genitalia.
The eye of the camera.
and a completely different dialect, also without warning. I’ve probably made several wrong decisions in a row concerning my route and, in hindsight, this has led me to the right course.
A ladies’ bicycle, nearly brand-new, was thrown into a brook; it occupied my thoughts for quite some time. A crime? The scene of a fight? Something provincial – sultry – dramatic has taken place here, I suspect.
The universe is filled with Nothing, it is the Yawning Black Void. Systems of Milky Ways have condensed into Un-stars. Utter blissfulness is spreading, and out of utter blissfulness now springs the Absurdity. This is the situation. A dense cloud of flies and a plague of horseflies swirls around my head, so I’m forced to flail about with my arms, yet they pursue me bloodthirstily nevertheless. How can I go shopping?
Gasping from the mad race I reached the mountain of garbage, and needed quite a long time to recover from all this
No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it’s unimaginable.
Memorial plaques in Le Petit Raon for those deported by the Gestapo – 196 people, who comprised at least half the village. For quite some time I studied the plaques without realizing that from a stairway close by, a young woman was studying me. If the village hall had been open I would have asked what had happened there.
In front of the café a brand new Citroen is parked with a huge load of hay strapped to the roof.
Rambervillers. As I walk the word ‘millet’, which I’ve always liked so much, just won’t leave my mind, the word ‘lusty’ as well. Finding a connection between the two words becomes torture. To walk lustily works, and to reap millet with a sickle also works. But millet and lusty together doesn’t work.
My output of sweat is prodigious, as I march lustily thinking of millet. Everything’s grey on grey. Cows loom astonished.
I’ve never seen such expressions of trust as I found on the faces of those sheep in the snow.
Santa himself looked so moonstruck that I almost suffered a stroke. His face is barely visible for the cotton mop of a beard, with the rest hidden by black sunglasses.
The land here is being carelessly killed. Children are playing around the church. During the night I was very cold.
The village was sluggish yesterday, like a caterpillar in the cold. Today, on Sunday, it’s already become the chrysalis. Because of the frost, the earthworms unable to cross the asphalt road have burst. Underneath the eaves of tin, where one can sit outside in the summer, loneliness is crouching now, ready to spring.
There isn’t a single leaf on the wet tree, just wet apples refusing to fall. I picked one, it tasted pretty sour, but the juice in it quenched my thirst.
A Spanish priest was reading mass in bad English. He sang in awful tones into the over-amplified microphone, but behind him was some ivy on the stone wall, and there the sparrows were chattering, chattering so close to the microphone that one couldn’t understand the priest any more. The sparrows were amplified a hundred-fold. Then a pale young girl collapsed on the steps and died. Someone daubed cool water on her lips, but she preferred Death.
On the other side of the road, along the rim of a wet field, a huge dog strayed up to me, obviously ownerless. I said woof to him, then he immediately came and followed me.
The loneliness today stretched out ahead of me towards the west, though I couldn’t see that far as my eyesight let me down. I saw birds rising from an empty field, increasing ever more until the sky at last was filled with them, and I saw that they were coming from the womb of the earth, from very deep down, where gravity is.
Crystal clear weather for a while, a joyful feeling upon seeing the sun, everywhere steam: steam from the Aube as if it were boiling, steam from the fields. When I look up to the sky while walking, without realizing I walk on a curve towards the north.
I bought a carton of milk before crossing the Seine, drinking it as I sat on a railing of the bridge. The empty carton that I threw into the water will be in Paris before me.
truck splashed me with everything that was lying there. Shortly afterwards, the sun came out for just a few seconds, then a torrential rainfall. I grappled forward from cover to cover. At the village school in Savieres, I debated whether I should drive to Paris, seeing some sense in that. But getting so far on foot and then driving? Better to live out this senselessness, if that’s what this is, to the very end.
The blizzard made me laugh so hard that my face was all contorted when I entered the café. I was fearful the police would seize me, and so in front of a bathroom mirror once more I quickly made sure that I still looked fairly human.
"The Expression"
For one splendid, fleeting moment something mellow flowed through my deadly tired body. I said to her, open the window, from these last days onward I can fly.
