Bird without wings

 

As a young man Joë Bousquet came to England to study, Southampton I believe, and liked it so much he changed his name. In 1915 he was shot in the back and paralysed. Aged 19 he returned to his hometown of Carcassonne to a top-floor flat in the Rue De Verdun and, apart from a very few trips out in a wheelchair, never left it till he died 35 years later.

 

But he was a poet, a strange poet whose work drew the attention of people like Max Ernst, Luis Aragon and Paul Eluard who all saw in him something at once tragic and heroic. Here was an embodiment of the wounded king (or the Fisher King of the Grail legend) imprisoned by his injuries yet granted a vision of Truth witheld from ordinary mankind.

First, two rather beautiful observations (from recalltopoetry.blogspot)
"Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he wants to leave the world for a temporary but authentic solitude....Art seems to me determined to discover this secret wound in each being and even in each thing."
Jean Genet

"My wound existed before me, I was born to embody it."
Joe Bousquet

And now,(in rather crude translation):

The Bird Without Wings

The light glimmers in your eyes, but it is not yet day. You awoke too soon - but there you are. 
The street, the morning, the house and you; not that you care 
If this city, hauled from the fog, is yours or not.

Twelve silver bells ring out across the waters  
To the bed-steed and the bird of mercy  
And the soothing needle. Twelve iron bells ring
In the locks to open up a day filled with fallen leaves;
Ring in the rape of the sealed eyelids of the pallid sleeper.

The flotillas of day have slept beneath the snow.  
In but a few hours, with her golden buttons, her thorns and pink mayflowers,
That fresh-faced girl will wipe your face as she wipes you out.
Grasp the unseen flower, more faithful than a star. 
Carry it without looking.

The winged cherry-picker returns, with hair flying, and feet of clay.

His last years were spent surrounded by great art and books in a room whose curtains were never opened, and a fever of morphine, opium and poetry.

The room has been preserved exactly as he left it, smoke-stains and all, save for the pale impressions of paintings that have been sold to pay for its upkeep. La Maison des Memoires.

Maison des Mémoires
Esprits Nomades

Of stray dogs and fossils...

Spot the difference: On the left a sea-creature sighted between Antibes and Nice in 1562 as reported by the naturalist Conrad Gesner; on the right Jorges Luis Borges, unsighted since 1986.

In The Analytical Language of John Wilkins Borges mentions 'a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into 

a) those that belong to the emperor; 

b) embalmed ones; 

c) those that are trained; 

d) suckling pigs; 

e) mermaids; 

f) fabulous ones; 

g) stray dogs; 

h) those that are included in this classification; 

i) those that tremble as if they were mad; 

j) innumerable ones; 

k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; 

l) etcetera; 

m) those that have just broken the flower vase; 

n) those that at a distance resemble flies. 

The Bibliographical Institute of Brussels also exercises chaos: it has parcelled the universe into 1,000 subdivisions…”

In A Book on Fossil Objects, Chiefly Stones and Gems, their Shapes and Appearances, Conrad Gesner classified fossils into:.

1. Those whose forms are based upon, have some relation to, or suggest the geometrical conception of points, lines or angles
2. Those which resemble or derive their name from some heavenly body or from on of the Aristotelian elements
3. Those which take their name from something in the sky
4. Those which are named after inanimate terrestrial objects
5. Those which bear a resemblance to certain artificial things
6. Things made artificially out of metals, stones, or gems
7. Those which resemble plants or herbs
8. Those which have the form of shrubs
9. Those which resemble trees or portions of trees
10. Corals
11. Other sea plants which have a stony nature
12. Those which have some resemblance to men or to four-footed animals, or are found within these
13. Stones which derive their names from birds
14. Those which have a resemblance to things which live in the sea
15. Those which resemble insects or serpents