Black Spring

Tomorrow you may bring about the destruction of your world. Tomorrow you may sing in Paradise above the smoking ruins of your world-cities. But tonight I would like to think of one man, a lone individual, a man without name or country, a man whom I respect because he has absolutely nothing in common with you - MYSELF. Tonight I shall meditate upon that which I am.

I used to think then that all the tragic events of life were written down in books and that what went on outside was just diluted crap.

Up on the Brooklyn Bridge a man is standing in agony, waiting to jump, or waiting to write a poem, or waiting for the blood to leave his vessels because if he advances another foot the pain of his love will kill him.

the world is the mirror of myself dying.

Her eyes were so big and bright, as if they saw more than they could comprehend. Bright with terror, and beneath the terror a limitless confusion. That’s what made them so beautifully bright. You have to be crazy to see things so lucidly, so all at once. If you’re great you can stay that way and people will believe in you, swear by you, turn the world upside down for you. But if you’re only partly great, or just a nobody, then what happens to you is lost.

The dreamers dream from the neck up, their bodies securely strapped to the electric chair. To imagine a new world is to live it daily, each thought, each glance, each step, each gesture killing and recreating, death always a step in advance. To spit on the past is not enough. To proclaim the future is not enough. One must act as if the past were dead and the future unrealizable. One must act as if the next step were the last, which it is. Each step forward is the last, and with it a world dies, one’s self included. We are here of the earth never to end, the past never ceasing, the future never beginning, the present never ending. The never-never world which we hold in our hands and see and yet is not ourselves. We are that which is never concluded, never shaped to be recognized, all there is and yet not the whole, the parts so much greater than the whole that only God the mathematician can figure it out.

I remember that just as I was about to cross the border they asked me what I had to declare and, like an idiot, I answered: "I want to declare that I am a traitor to the human race.

No more peeping through keyholes! No more mas turbating in the dark! No more public confessions! Unscrew the doors from their jambs! I want a world where the vagina is represented by a crude, honest slit, a world that has feeling for bone and contour, for raw, primary colors, a world that has fear and respect for its animal origins. I’m sick of looking at cunts all tickled up, disguised, deformed, idealized. Cunts with nerve ends exposed. I don’t want to watch young virgins masturbating in the privacy of their boudoirs or biting their nails or tearing their hair or lying on a bed full of bread crumbs for a whole chapter. I want Madagascan funeral poles, with animal upon animal and at the top Adam and Eve, and Eve with a crude, honest slit between the legs. I want hermaphrodites who are real hermaphrodites, and not make-believes walking around with an atrophied penis or a dried-up cunt. I want a classic purity, where dung is dung and angels are angels. The Bible a la King James, for example. Not the Bible of Wycliffe, not the Vulgate, not the Greek, not the Hebrew, but the glorious, death-dealing Bible that was created when the English language was in flower, when a vocabulary of twenty thousand words sufficed to build a monument for all time. A Bible written in Svenska or Tegalic, a Bible for the Hottentots or the Chinese, a Bible that has to meander through the trickling sands of French is no Bible-it is a counterfeit and a fraud. The King James Version was created by a race of bone-crushers. It revives the primitive mysteries, revives rape, murder, incest, revives epilepsy, sadism, megalomania, revives demons, angels, dragons, leviathans, revives magic, exorcism, contagion, incantation, revives fratricide, regicide, patricide, suicide, revives hypnotism, anarchism, somnambulism, revives the song, the dance, the act, revives the mantic, the chthonian, the arcane, the mysterious, revives the power, the evil, and the glory that is God. All brought into the open on a colossal scale, and so salted and spiced that it will last until the next Ice Age. A classic purity, then-and to hell with the Post Office authorities! For what is it enables the classics to live at all, if indeed they be living on and not dying as we and all about us are dying? What preserves them against the ravages of time if it be not the salt that is in them? When I read Petronius or Apuleius or Rabelais, how close they seem! That salty tang! That odor of the menagerie! The smell of horse piss and lion’s dung, of tiger’s breath and elephant’s hide. Obscenity, lust, cruelty, boredom, wit. Real eunuchs. Real hermaphrodites. Real pricks. Real cunts. Real banquets! Rabelais rebuilds the walls of Paris with human cunts. Trimalchio tickles his own throat, pukes up his own guts, wallows in his own swill. In the amphitheater, where a big, sleepy pervert of a Caesar lolls dejectedly, the lions and the jackals, the hyenas, the tigers, the spotted leopards are crunching real human boneswhilst the coming men, the martyrs and imbeciles, are walking up the golden stairs shouting Hallelujah!

I am a man of the old world, a seed that was transplanted by the wind, a seed which failed to blossom in the mushroom oasis of America. I belong on the heavy tree of the past. My allegiance, physical and spiritual, it is with the men of Europe, those who were once Franks, Gauls, Vikings, Huns, Tatars, what not. The climate for my body and soul is here where there is quickness and corruption. I am proud not to belong in this century.

For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.

En la juventud éramos íntegros y el terror y el dolor del mundo nos penetraron por completo. No había una clara separación entre la alegría y la pena: se fundían en una sola cosa, al igual que nuestras horas de lucidez se funden con el sueño y el dormir. Nos levantamos por la mañana siendo unos seres, y por la noche, completamente ahogados, bajamos a un mar empuñando las estrellas y la fiebre del día.

Always a good dodge to simplify your problem by removing it.

Mắt của cô thật to và sáng, như thể chúng nhìn thấy nhiều hơn chúng có thể hiểu được. Sáng lên với kinh hoàng, và ở bên dưới sự kinh hoàng là sự lúng túng vô bờ bến. Đó là thứ làm cho chúng trông thật sáng. Bạn phải bị điên để nhìn được mọi thứ thật rõ ràng, thật cùng một lúc. Nếu bạn vĩ đại bạn có thể giữ nguyên như thế và người ta sẽ tin vào bạn, sẽ thề bằng tên bạn, sẽ đảo lộn thế giới cho bạn. Nhưng nếu bạn chỉ hơi hơi vĩ đại, hoặc không là gì cả, thì thứ xảy ra với bạn là lạc lối.

Nimalo se, kažem, ne može nauditi velikoj knjizi ako se ponese u zahod. Samo beznačajne knjige trpe zbog toga. Samo beznačajne knjige služe brisanju guzice. Takva je knjiga Mali Cezar koja je sad prevedena na francuski i koja je izišla u biblioteci Passions. Dok okrećem stranice te knjige, čini mi se da sam opet kod kuće i da čitam naslove u novinama, da slušam one proklete radio aparate, da se vozim u starim krntijama, da pijem jeftini džin, da guram kukuruzni klip u dupe prostitutkama djevicama, da vješam Crnce i žive ih spaljujem. Da čovjek dobije sraćku. A to isto vrijedi za Atlantic M o n t h 1 y ili za bilo koji drugi mjesečnik, za Aldousa Huxleyja, Gertrudu Stein, Sinclaria Lewisa, Hemingwaya, Dos Passosa, Dreisera itd, itd... Ne čujem nikakvo zvono da zvoni u meni kad donesem te ptičice u WC. Povučem lančić i odoše u kanal. Niz Seinu pa u Atlantski ocean. Možda će za godinu dana opet izroniti — na obalama Coney Islan-da ili Midland Beacha ili Miamija, s mrtvim meduzama, puževima, račićima, rabljenim prezervativima, ružičastim toaletnim papirom, jučerašnjim novostima, sutrašnjim samoubojstvima ... str. 58-59