I The Supreme - pg. 225

Take Benjamin Franklin, steel-engraved, down from the wall. The Porteno pettifogger gazes, frowning, at the inventor of the lightning rod. Manuel Belgrano opens his eyes. This, my friends, is the first democrat of these new worlds. The model that we must imitate. Forty years from now, our countries may have men like him. If and when, naturally, the great country of the north continues to produce men like Franklin. If it does, we may enjoy in the future of the freedom for which we are not prepared today. By some misfortune, it may so happen that North America will not produce more men of the stamp of the inventor of the lightning rod and that in our countries the lightning bolt of anarchy will strike down our best men. It may so happen that they will invent the Big Prod up there and that down here we'll all die of the croup, carbuncle, and tick, like the cattle in our fields. We must take care not to fall into the hands of master-butchers.

I The Supreme - pg. 207

Above all, senor dean, if we do not observe the formalities of an elementary urbanity. Is the bathroom door a proper place to enrue that all our disagreements will come out in the wash? We are in accord on that point, doctor. Let us proceed to the salon d'a-grement.

I The Supreme - pg. 197

I believe that at one time the pen must also have possessed a third function: reproducing the phonic space of writing, the sound-text of the visual images; which could have been the spoken time of those words without forms, of those forms without words, that allowed El Supremo to conjoin three texts in a fourth intemporal dimension turning around the axis of an undifferentiated point between the origin and the extinction of the writing; that thin shadow between tomorrow and death.

This Week

• The Idiot: Finish
• Descartes Paper
• Persian lesson 80
• French Chapter 4, 5 & 6
• Second Draft SS

Destroyer : New Ways Of Living

Maybe I should have loved you.
Maybe I should have sworn
Not to be born
Of this wretched glove too soon,
But a dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
A dragon needs room
To run, run, run, run...

I was a desert in love with extremes.
You married well, a gentlewoman of means who
Kept the word "Destroyer" embroidered on her jeans, too

(La la la)

I wore skins. I didn't care who survived.
The band foretold trends from Spring of '85.
They're calling it "The New Decay"...
Hey, so am I.

(La la la)

Treacherous fop, don't be embarrassed
For looking good at your table on the terrace
That you call home. I'm sold
Paris, London, Rome's too old for you
And your kind
Explosions want to see what they can find:
New ways of living...

It's you and your kind:
The New Ways of Living

This Week

1. The Idiot - 350 pgs
2. Descartes FIN: Paper
3. Short Story First Draft
4. Persian Lesson 80
5. French First Chapter

ھوای گریہ دارم

Ghazal - pg. 266

کوئےجاناں چمن سے بہتر ہے اس کا کتا ہرن سے بہتر ہے

گل قبا پر ہو جامے سے باہر کب ترے پیرہن سے بہتر ہے

گور میں بھاگ اہلِ دنیا سے خلوت اِس انجمن سے بہتر ہے

چمن دہر کا ہے ہر گل خوب نسترن، یاسمن سے بہتر ہے

ہنسنے والا نہیں ہے رونے پر ہم کو غربت وطن سے بہتر ہے

ترک دنیا سمجھ جواں مردی نفرت اس پیرِ زن سے بہتر ہے

بازو اس کا مکاں، شکم اس کا دھکدکی نورتن سے بہتر ہے

نہیں کھلتا کسی طرح سے پھر عیب پوشی کفن سے بہتر ہے

سیب ہے یہ تو پھر بہی ہے وہ غبغب اے دل زقن سے بہتر ہے

مانگئے کیا خدا سے چشمئہ خضر کیا صنم کے دہن سے بہتر ہے

دشمنِ جاں اجل کو جان آتش
دوستی گورکن سے بہتر ہے ۔

Correspondence - Opening

1

Paul Celan to Ingeborg Bachmann, poem and dedication in a book of Matisse paintings, Vienna 24(?) June 1948

'In Egypt'

For Ingeborg

Thou shalt say to the strange woman's eye: be the water!

Thou shalt seek in the stranger's eye those whom thou knowest to be in the water.

Thou shalt call them from the water: Ruth! Noemi! Miriam!

Thou shalt adorn them when thou liest with the stranger.

Thou shalt adorn them with the cloud-hair of the stranger.

Thou shalt say to Ruth, to Miriam and Noemi:

Behold, I sleep next to her!

Thou shalt adorn the stranger next to thee most beautifully of all

Thou shalt adorn her with the pain over Ruth, over Miriam and Noemi.

Thous shalt say to the stranger:
Behold, I slept next to these!

Vienna, 23 May 1948

To the meticulous one,

22 years after her birthday,

From the unmeticulous one

I The Supreme - pg. 196

The figure of the typical Brazilian macaque stands out against the whiteness of the wall. I study it from my window. Unknown animal: lion in front, ant behind, pudenda inverted. Leopard, more pard than leo. Illusory human form. Its most amazing particularity, however, lies in the fact that when the sun strikes it, it casts the shadow of a human being and not that of its bestial figure.

I The Supreme - pg. 195

Not enough. Not red enough. Not as red as real blood. Perhaps it suffices to simulate it beneath the marginal sun of Brazil, to the west of Africa. The incendiary sun of Asuncion is another matter. Continually beating straight down, splitting stone. The glare bares, betrays, bleaches out the treasures of this card-board carnival. Blurs the dancing girls, the capoeiras. The white hand against the black lacquer of the carriage clutching the ibis of the hat. Royal-heron. Bird-of-Paradise. Alchemical buttons. Colored sequins. Wear more if you like. Pile on as much as you please. To me it will be mere theater. To me the imperial envoy is just another messenger boy. An empty-headed suitor come to seek my hand. But I don't give my hand away to anyone.

The Shampoo

The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.

And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.

The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.

(shigekuni.wordpress.com posted originally)

This Week

• The Idiot: 100 pgs
• Bastos: Complete
• Short Story First Draft
• Persian: Revision, Lesson 75
• Descartes: FIN

I The Supreme - pg. 194

There comes forth from the souvenir-pen another reception that I shall offer the envoy from Brazil, fifteen years later. I can allow myself the luxury of mixing up the facts without confusing them. I thus save myself time, paper, ink, and the trouble of searching through almanacs, calendars, dusting shelf lists. I don't write history. I make it. I can remake it as I please, adjusting, stressing, enriching its meaning and truth. In the history written by publicans and pharisees, they invest their lies at compound interest. Dates to them are sacred. Particularly if they are erroneous. To those rodents, error consists precisely of gnawing holes in documented truth. They turn into rivals of moths and rats. As for this perpetual-circular, the order of the facts does not alter the product of the factors.

I The Supreme - pg. 193

A plain chicken done up in fancy dress. A monocular chicken. Any creature of the animal kingdom except a man to be trusted. No, doctor, this was the setting for another performance. The thing is that in Paraguay time is so hard-pressed that it slows way down, mixing up facts, shuffling things about, misplacing them. Fortune is born here every morning and by noon it's already an old lady, according to an old saying that's new and true all over again each day.

I The Supreme - pg. 193

[(In the margin): The catfish of Takuary had turned into a prickly bone. The fish is born of a thorn. The monkey of a coconut. Man of the monkey. The shadow of Christopher Columbus's egg wheels round and round above the Land of Fire. The shadow is not more difficult than the egg. The shadow flees before itself. Everything eventually gets to where it's going. Merely to be on the way is already to be arriving. ]

The Idiot - Opening

TOWARDS THE END of November, during a warm spell, at around nine o' clock in the morning, a train of the Petersburg-Warsaw line was approaching Petersburg at full stream. It was so damp and foggy that dawn could barely break; ten paces to right or left of the line it was hard to make out anything at all through the carriage windows.

FIRST VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JULY 2003

Copyright 2001 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Classics and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

The Man-Moth

The Man-moth
Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.

But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.

I The Supreme - pg. 190

On this mission Belgrano represented candor, good faith, loftiness of character. Vicente Anastasio Echevarria cleverness, knowledge of the ways of men and things, easy and persuasive eloquence. I saw in this jackanapes only a varicose, viperine tongue; I heard in him only the tumult of his outlandish ideas peeking out of his reptilian eyes. Belgrano, on the other hand, was a man of much greater worth than the description of him by the Tacit Brigadier. A transparent soul, that of this man unacquainted with evil, peeping out through the pupils of his clear blue eyes. A man of peace condemned to be different from what he was in the depths of his being.

I The Supreme - pg. 186

... wait patiently because they will reign here again. They are the Old Ones because they are wise. You must not ask questions, the Voice-of-Before says to you. You must not ask questions because there is no answer. Do not try to get to the bottom of things. You will not find the truth that you betrayed. You have lost yourself after having caused the failure of the very Revolution that you sought to make. Do not try to purge your soul of lies. All this prattle is futile. Many other things you have not thought of will go up in smoke. Your power has no power over them. You are not you but others ... (the following folio is missing...)

I The Supreme - pg. 184

A future hero may be forgiven certain present vices.

I The Supreme - pg. 178

(4) What about Senora Pureza? Has she already arrived there? Have you offered her asylum, cordial hospitality, as I ordered you to do in my previous dispatch? Treat her with all the respect that so eminent a lady deserves, for the country owes her many services that I alone have any knowledge of. You need not play high and mighty with her or launch into those lofty diatribes of yours which in your stupidity you fondly believe enhance your authority. Authority that is not yours, but merely conferred upon you as a deputy of the Supreme Power.

I The Supreme - pg. 174

Inform the parish priest of Encarnacion of my sovereign will and decree:

He is to declare where the soul of the late Jose Custodio Arroyo ended up. If he find him in hell, he is to leave him there. Should this prove impossible to verify, he is to proceed immediately to give the corpse sacred internment, after a funeral with the body lying in state. Without charge. Pass the dossier on to the vicar general. Order is also hereby given to transport the priest of Encarnacion to the penal colony of Tevego.

Thomas Bernhard

Whatever you write it's always a catastrophe. That's the depressing thing about the fate of a writer . . . All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined . . . It's especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.

I The Supreme - pg. 171

So that I too, according to the diagnostic powers of this agnostic savage, have soul-eggs that are all broken. All he sees is emptiness amid the bones. But emptiness is still something; everything depends on what a person makes of it. No? Yes. The pamphleteering fetuses of the chivosis are twisting the wet rag of my body underground. They're drinking maize beer. They keep on twisting me, their pockets bulging with calumnies. They drink more beer. They throw me into the fire. My body smolders in the tremors of being-dead-continually. But they won't put an end to me. I'm water that boils outside the pot, a schoolgirl will say of me. Being dead and remining on my feet is my forte, and even though for me it's all a return trip, it's always adios and onward, and I never come back, right? Right! Do trees grow downward? Do birds fly backward? Does a word that's spoken get wet? Can all of you hear what I don't say, see clearly in the dark? What is said is said. If you only listen to the half of it, you'd understand the double. I feel like a fresh-laid egg.

I The Supreme - pg. 169

Here in my bedroom, the muffled tick-tock of the watches, among them the one Belgrano presented to Cavanas at Takuary. The faint flutter of moths in the books. The stealthy minute hand of the wood borer in the timbers. Every so often the weary sounds of the cathedral bell, marking not hours but centuries. How long a time I haven't slept! Everything is repeated, in the image of what has been and will be. The infinitely great and the infinitely small. Absolutely true that there is nothing new under the sun, and this very sun the repetition of innumerable suns that have existed and will exist. The ancients knew the sun was two thousand leagues distant and were surprised that it looked to be two hundred paces away. They knew the eye could not see the sun if the eye were not somehow a sin itself. More than necessary to know how not to fall sick, to make oneself invulnerable to everything. According to the Jesuit Montoya, the Indian chieftain Avaporu chewed the magic herb of the Yayeupa-Guasu he sneezed three times and became invisible. So that even if I were dead I wouldn't be, since I would be my repetition. Only the shell of my first soul would be broken or dead after having incubated the others.

I The Supreme - pg. 167

I'm tired of their clowning. I don't intend to answer them. Nothing enhances authority so much as silence. My patience has a very wide turning circle.

I The Supreme - pg. 165

From the people-multitude I picked the men who formed the skeleton organization of the army of the people. An even more invincible support than that of cannons and rifles in the defense of the Republic and the Revolution.

I The Supreme - pg. 161

The cardboard figures of the Junta became more and more unsteady. In the Yegros mansion, band, orchestra, elegant soirees, roistering, revelry, night after night.

I The Supreme - pg. 160

We cannot oblige our citizens to sleep in peace with a river on the rampage. You alone, as officers of the General Staff, named by the Governing Junta, paid by it in the country's money, are not the people. By acting in this fashion, you are, rather, the counterpeople. By your very profession as military officers, you ought to be the first to set an example of faithful performance of your duties; of respect for the dignity of the Junta; of decency and honor to citizens, protecting those who are most defenseless, ignorant, and humble, those who have been taught to welcome blows as though they were a blessing from God.

I The Supreme - pg. 152

The only thing I'm asking you is your permission to incubate in your incubus-cube. I don't want to be engraved in a woman's womb. I want to be born in a man's thought. Leave the rest to me.

I The Supreme - pg. 147

What deeply pains us and disturbs us in the venom of sedition and atheism that the books and the ideas of those libertine impostors that all of you are reading in secret are insinuating into your minds. The devil, my son, is prompting the pages of those decidal and regicidal books. Spitting on the Holy Books his execrable slaver of exotic doctrines. But, your paternity, the God that all of you have brought to our America, binding to his services the mitayo and yanacona gods of the Indians, is exotic too. Don't be a heretic, my son! No, reverend father. We simply want to know what is new, and not just keep parroting the Paternicas, the Summa, the maxims of Peter Lombard.

I The Supreme - pg. 137

'For the love of God,' I said, 'fourteen years after you should, by every natural law, be in your grave, how can you turn yourself into an object of ridicule for your enemies or an object of pity for your friends?'

I The Supreme - pg. 137

The two of you made the trees shake, the water in the river boil when you dived into it naked. Dona Juana's ardor made the white-hot heat of afternoon siestas last far into the night. She brought cool night dew to the boiling point. A fog with the taste of acid drifted across the land bathed in moonlight. It crept into my hermetically sealed house.

I The Supreme - pg. 136

Ah! You behaved like a gentleman in this hospitable land!

I The Supreme - pg. 131

An exhalation, a breath of its own. Those who know most, see most, are always blind. Those with the sweetest voices, the mute. Those with the keenest hearing, the deaf. Homer! O mere repeater of other blind men and deafmutes! Man's principal malady is his insatiable curiosity regarding things he cannot know.

I The Supreme - pg. 130

The pelican loves its offspring. If it comes back to the nest and finds that they have bitten by serpents, it tears its breast open with its beak. It washes them in its blood. It restores them to life. Is it not I who am the Supreme Pelican in Paraguay?

I The Supreme - pg. 129

No, Mister William, here in this country even the most humble remains are precious to us. We're very poor, hence we can't give up even our pride. But, sir, to drink this is to snatch up Hades itself and drink it to someone's health, the younger of the Robertsons said in English with a hearty guffaw.

I The Supreme - pg. 121

What answer can you give me? There's no bone, you tell me. There must be something worse then; some weight that makes their heads fall down onto their chests. Look for it, find it, my good sir! With at least the same diligence with which you hunt for the rarest species of plants and insects.

I The Supreme - pg. 117

You don't know. Well then, listen. The first reason is that animals live amid nature, which knows neither pity nor compassion, the source of all ills. Secondly, they do not speak or write as men do; in particular, they do not pen calumnies the way you do. Thirdly, birds and all animal or animated species do their business at the very moment they feel the need to.

I The Supreme - pg. 109

Decidedly, Tacitus-Brigadier, you give every appearance of being a veterinarian of the remount cavalry, a penpushing quartermaster clerk.

This Week

• The Idiot: 100 pgs
• Bastos: Complete
• Short Story First Draft
• Persian: Revision, Lesson 75

I The Supreme - pg. 108

(in the private notebook)

Signing this armistice, so contrary to the aims of the annexionist invasion and the interests of Buenos Aires, was to prod a sore spot, the Tacitus of the Plata will say later on. Our sorest spot of all, Tacitus-Brigadier. You too will invade our country; and then you will begin quietly translating the Divine Comedy by invading Alighieri's Avernal circles.

I The Supreme - pg. 107

He baits the hook with an already fried catfish; he tosses the line into the Takuary; he waits, pole in one hand, the gold key of free exchange glittering in the other. The virtue of the key is that it is aperitive; that of the hook that it hooks things. The Paraguayan chiefs, mouths wide open, were hooked. The tobacconist-chief catches sight of the nutritive fortune amid the reflections.

I The Supreme - pg. 106

At the very top of the Orange Trees, observing the evolutions of the battle. And where did you come from?, they ask the completely naked peasant, half dead with fear. I ... the poor man murmurs covering his privates with his hands. I came ... I just came to have myself a peek at all this pantomonium!

I The Supreme - pg. 100

Whoever you are, insolent corrector of my pen, you are beginning to annoy me. You don't understand what I write. You don't understand that the law is symbolic. Twisted minds are unable to grasp this. They interpret the symbols literally. And so you make mistakes and fill my margins with your scoffing self-importance. At least read me correctly. There are clear/obscure symbols. I the Supreme play my passion cold-bloodedly ...

I The Supreme - pg. 97

For the moment God does not occupy my mind. The question that preoccupies it is ruling over chance. Putting my daedal digit on the die, the die in the dicebox. Getting the country out of its labyrinth.

I The Supreme - pg. 96

Chance exists only because oblivion exists.

I The Supreme - pg. 95

(Written in the margin. Unknown hand: By so doing, you were trying to imitate Descartes, who detested fresh eggs. He let them incubate beneath the ashes and drank down the emrbyonic substance. You wanted to do the same thing without being Descartes. You were not going to eat the Revolution every morning for breakfast with your mate. You turned this country into a lustral, expiatory egg that will hatch heaven only knows when, heaven only knows how, heaven only knows what. Embryo of what might have been the most prosperous country in the world. The best cock in all human legend.)

I The Supreme - pg. 88

To be nothing. To know nothing. Obscure sunflowers, their sorrow projects its shadow over the water. What do they know of cross-bones, of cross-words, of cross-bearing crusades. Volumes and volumes of ignorance and knowledge come out of their mouths in spirals of smoke.

I The Supreme - pg. 84

The power of those who govern, your uncle wisely assures me, is founded on ignorance, on the tameness and meekness of the people. Power has weakness as its foundation. This foundation is firm because its greatest security lies in the weakness of the people.

Note

Note to self:

I am writing again ...

I The Supreme - pg. 71

The incommensurable fury of lust groans, cries out, insults, implores the barren divinities, in a fly's voice. Rage of exhaustion. It appears to fill the heavens and fits in the palm of one hand. The tremendous volcano does not pour forth a single drop of its burning lava. The sails of dreams lie limp, without the breath of a breeze to swell them. Enough!

I The Supreme - pg. 67

The writing mania appears to be the symptom of an uncontainable century. Outside of Paraguay, when has so much been written as in the days since the world has lain in perpetual convulsion? Not even the Romans in the period of their decadence. There is no more deadly merchandise than the books of there convulsionaries. There is no worse plague than the scribonic. Menders of lies and benders of truths. Lenders of their pens, the borrowed plumes of plebeian peacocks. When I think of this perverse fauna, I imagine a world in which men are born old. They shrink, they shrivel till they're small enough to put inside a bottle. They grow smaller still inside it, so that a person could eat ten Alexanders and twenty Caesars spread on a slice of bread or a chunk of manioc cake. My advantage is that I no longer need to eat and it matters not at all to me if I am eaten by those worms.

I The Supreme - pg. 65

Books have a destiny, though destiny has no book. Without the people from which they had been cut off by sign and story even the prophets would not have been able to write the Bible. The Greek people called Homer composed the Iliad. The Egyptians and the Chinese dictated their histories to scribes who dreamed of being the people, not copyists who sneezed the way you do on what you've written. A Homer-people creates a novel.

To Do List

• ss#1
• Bastos pg. 160
• Descartes 3rd meditation

I The Supreme - pg. 61

The proximity of sleep files the angles smooth. The spirals sprawl out more. The resistance from left to right, weaker. Delirium, intimate friend of the nocturnal hand. The curves sway less. The sperm of the ink dries more slowly. The movements are divergent. The strokes droop more. They tend to distend.

I The Supreme - pg. 59

forget your memory. To write does not mean to convert the real into words but to make the power of the word real. The unreal lies only in the bad use of the power of words in the bad use of writing. I don't understand, Sire ... Never mind. The pressure is enormous but you almost don't feel it you don't feel it eh what is it that you feel.

I The Supreme - pg. 57

When I dictate to you, the words have a meaning; when you write them, another. So that we speak two different languages. One feels more at home in the company of a familiar dog than in that of a man speaking a language unknown to us. False language is much less sociable than silence. Even my dog Sultan took the secret of what he said to the grave with him.

I The Supreme - pg. 56

Don't try to imitate them. Don't use improper words that are not my style, that are not steeped in my thought. I loathe relative talent that's begged and borrowed. What's more, your style is abominable. A labyrinthine alleyway paved with alliterations, anagrams, idiosyncratic idioms, barbarisms, parnamasias such as paroli/parulis, imbecilic anastrophes to dazzle imbecilic inverts who experience erections by virtue of the effect of the violent inversions of word order, such as: Beneath the foot of the tree I fall; or one more violent still: Having Revolution firmly planted in my head, the pike winks its conniving eyes at me from the Plaza.

I The Supreme - pg. 55

Give me your hand. Are you going to get up, Sire? Let me have your hand. A very great honor for this servant to have Your Excellency extend his hand to me. I'm not holding my hand out to you. I'm ordering you to hold yours our to me. It's not a reconciliation I'm proposing to you; simply a simulacrum of temporary identification.

This is a lesson. The last one. It ought to have been the first one. Since I am unable to offer you a Last Supper with the flock of Judases who are my apostles, I offer you a late-first class.

Maximilien Robespierre

If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country. ... The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny.

I The Supreme - pg. 51

You remove something from your bosom. Throw. Something bounces off the planisphere, between the constellations of the Altar odor of a musk cat. The unmistakable, immemorial odor of woman. Carnal smell of sex. Lustful, sensual, lubricious, libidinous, salacious, voluptuous, dishonest, shameless, lascivious, fornicatory. Its effluvia expand, fill the room. Penetrate the smallest interstices. Make the heaviest objects sway to and fro as on a tide. The furniture, the arms. Even the meteorite seems to float and bob in the terrible stench. It must be invading the entire city. I am paralyzed with nausea. Retching, on the point of vomiting. With a supreme effort, I contain myself. It is not merely that I smell this female odor, that I have suddenly remembered it. I see it. Fiercer than a phantom that attacks us in broad daylight, leaping back and forth, to the end of those first days, burned up, forgotten, in the brothels of the Lower Town. The smell is here now. Female-Samson, she has embraced the pillars of my temperate temple. She coils her thousands of arms round the wooden columns of my unimpregnable eremitorium-erectorium. Trying to topple it. She looks at me blindly, sniffs at me, invisible. Trying to topple me. Sultan enters.

I The Supreme - pg. 49

Don't start measuring my trouser's fly with my theodolite. That apparatus served me to rebuild the City that in three centuries your ancestors left more choked with filth than Augeas' stables.

I The Supreme - pg. 48

She runs her hand over the meteor as she looks around out of the corner of her eye. A gentle caress of the jeopard-hawk of the cosmos. Chance-stone chained in a corner of the room giving off invisible light, a warning of minor hazards: this woman with the svelte body bare-ly trembling. She does not hide the clear intentions in the darkest corners of her mind.

I The Supreme - pg. 45

Follow the trail of the handwriting through the labyrinths of ... (torn).

... the filigreed fleuron in the vergered-perjured paper, the flagellated letters, now mark the unreality of the inexistent. In the forest of differences in which we lie, I too must guard against being deluded by the delirium of similarities. People all reassure themselves with the thought that they are a single individual. Difficult to be the same man constantly. What is the same is not always the same. I am not always I. The only one who doesn't change is HE. He maintains himself in the invariable. He is there, in the state of superlunary beings. If I close my eyes, I still see him, infinitely repeated in the rings of the concave mirror. (I must look for my notes on this subject of almastronomy.) It is not merely a question of eyelids. Sometimes HE looks at me, and then my bed rises and drifts at the mercy of whirlwinds, and I, lying in it, seeing everything from very high up or very deep down, till everything disappears in the point, in the place of absence. Only HE remains, not losing an iota of his form, of his dimension, but rather, growing, increasing by himself.

I The Supreme - pg. 33

Can I sell you the office of Perpetual Dictator?

God's Little Mountain

God's Little Mountain


Below, the river scrambled like a goat
Dislodging stones. The mountain stamped its foot,
Shaking, as from a trance. And I was shut
With wads of sound into a sudden quiet.

I thought the thunder had unsettled heaven;
All was so still. And yet the sky was cloven
By flame that left the air cold and engraven.
I waited for the word that was not given,

Pent up into a region of pure force,
Made subject to the pressure of the stars;
I saw the angels lifted like pale straws;
I could not stand before those winnowing eyes

And fell, until I found the world again.
Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen;
For though the head frames words the tongue has none.
And who will prove the surgeon to this stone?

Blackwater Fort

As I had held Carlotta close

that night we watched some Xenophon

embedded with the 5th Marines

in the old Sunni Triangle

make a half-assed attempt to untangle

the ghastly from the price of gasoline.

There was a distant fanfaron

in the Nashville sky, where the wind

had now drawn itself up and pinned

on her breast a Texaco star.

"Why," Carlotta wondered, "the House of Tar?

Might it have to do with the gross

imports of crude oil Bush will come clean on

only when the Tigris comes clean?"

Epiphany #3

It's important to take extra measures for one's safety sometimes well ahead of time

I The Supreme - pg. 25

A thicker stroke. A thinner one. The mustaches of the t's longer or shorter, depending on how free the hand of the person who set them down. The little pigtail of the o, standing straight up or drooping. Not to mention the instep, the crooked legs of the letters. The columns. The fleurons. The finials. The curlicues. The campanulas capping the capitals. The morning-glory vines of the flourishes drawn in a single spiral with one stroke of the pen, which is what Your Excellency traces beneath his Supreme Nature, climbing the wall of the writing sometimes ... Enough of your scriptuary floriculture, you dimwit!

I The Supreme - pg. 23

You are to start tracking down the handwriting of the pasquinade in all the files. The dossiers of agreements, disagreements, counteragreements. International communication. Treaties. Remissory notes. Demissory letters. All the bills of Portugese-Brazilian traders, of Oriental merchants. The piles of paperwork concerning food excises, tithes, the salt tax. Fructuary assessments. State monopoly, commercial commissions, war duties. Import-export records. Customs permits for incoming-outgoing shipments. Complete correspondence of all functionaries, from the lowest rank to the highest. Messages in code from spies, informers, agents of the various intelligence branches. Invoices of arms smugglers. Everything. The least little scrap of paper with writing on it.

To Do List

• Bastos - 70 pages
• Descartes - secondary reading 100 pages

I The Supreme - pg. 10

She is never without her bezoar stone. She keeps it hidden underneath the niche of the Lord of Patience. More powerful than the image of the Bloodstained God. Talisman. Stair. Platform. Last step. The most resistant. It sustains her in the place of certainty. Place where there is no further need of any sort of help. Obsession has its foundation there. Faith is supported entirely by itself. What is faith if not belief in things that have no verisimilitude? Seeing through a glass darkly.

The ruminant-stone has its own vigil light. Someday it will have its own niche. Perhaps, in time, its sanctuary.

I The Supreme - pg. 5

Do you know what memory is? The stomach of the soul, someone wrongly called it. Though nobody is ever the first to give things a name. There is nothing but an infinity of repeaters. The only things ever invented are new errors. The memory of one person alone is useless.

Stomach of the soul. That's too clever by half!

I The Supreme - Opening

I the Supreme Dictator of the Republic

Order that on the occasion of my death my corpse

be decapitated; my head placed on a pike for three days in the Plaza de la Republica, to

which the people are to be summoned by the sounding of a full peal of bells.

All my civil and military servants are to be

hanged. Their corpses are to be buried in

pastures outside the walls with neither

cross nor mark to commemorate their names.

At the end of the aforementioned period, I

order that my remains be burned and my ashes thrown into the river ...

Where was this found? Nailed to the door of the cathedral, Excellency. A patrol of grenadiers discovered it early this morning and brought it in to headquarters. Luckily no one had read it.