Hopscotch: Chapter 73

[The Johnny]

73

Yes, but who will cure us of the deaf fire, of the colorless fire that runs thru the dusk of the rue of Huchette, going out thru the rotten doorways, of the decayed exteriors, of the imageless fire that licks stones and stalks in the doorsteps, how can we wash ourselves of its sweet burn that continues, that sets on to last on, allied to time and memory, of sticky substances that keeps us on this side, and that will burn us away till we get calcinated.

Then it is best to make a pact like cats and moss, to inmediately make friends with the gatekeepers of husky voices, with the pale and suffering creatures that lurk the windows, playing with a dry branch. Burning without truce, bearing the central scorch that advances like the paulatine maturity in fruit, be the pulse of a bonfire, in this tangle of unending stone, to walk the nights of our lives with obedience in the blood in its blind circuit.

So many times i ask myself if this isnt anything more than literature, in a time in which we run into deceit between infalible equations and machines of conformisms. But to ask if we will find the other side of tradition or if its beter to go with the flow of its joyful cybernetic ¿isnt this literature again? Rebellion, conformism, angst, earthly food, all the dichotomies: Yin and Yang, contemplation or Tagikeit, rolled oats or partridges faisandées, Lascaux or Mathieu, what a hammock of words, what pocket dialectic with piyama storms and cataclisms of living room. The sole act of interrogating about the posible choice corrupts and murks that which is choosable.

Yes, no, that if if its here in this one... It would seem that a choice cannot be dialectic, that its setup cheapens it, i mean, distorts, i mean, transforms it into something else. Between Yin and Yang ¿how many aeons? Between yes and no ¿how many perhaps? Everything is literature, i mean, fable. ¿But whats the use of truth that reassures the honest owner? Our possible truth has to be invention, i mean literature, writing, painting, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world. Values, tures, sanctity, one ture, society, one ture, love, pure ture, beauty, ture of tures. In one of its books, Morelli speaks of the neapolitan that spent years sitting at the doorstep of his house, watching a screw on the floor.

By night he picked it up and placed it under his mattress. The screw first was laughter, pulling of hair, communal irritation, neighbor meeting, sign of violation of civic duty, finally it was a shrug, peace, the screw was peace, nobody could pass by the street without watching the screw thru the corner of their eyes without feeling it was peace. This guy died of a syncope, and the screw dissapeared just as neighbors arrived. One of them keeps it, maybe pulls it out in secret and watches it, puts it away again and goes to the factory feeling something he does not understand a dark reprobation. He only feels calm when he pulls out the screw and watches it, he stares at it until he hears footsteps and hurriedly hides it again.

Morelli thought that the screw must be something else, a god or something like that. Too easy solution. Maybe the mistake was in accepting that said object was a screw because of the fact that it had the shape of a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon. Maybe the neopolitan was an idiot but also he could be the inventor of a world. From the screw to an eye, from an eye to a star... ¿Why deliver oneself to the Great Tradition? One can choose ture, invention, i mean the screw or the toy car.

This is how Paris destroys us slowly, deliciously, grinding us between old flowers and paper tablecloths with wine stains, with its colorless fire that runs at dusk coming out of the rotten doorways. An invented fire scorches us, an incandescent ture, a widget of race, a city that is the Great Screw, the horrible needle with its nocturne eye thru which runs the thread of the Sena, torture machine like tiptoes, agony in a cage crowded with enfuriated swallows. We burn in our work, fabulous mortal honor, great challenge of the phoenix.

Nobody will cure us of the deaf fire, the colorless fire that runs at dusk thru the rue of Huchette. Incurable, perfectly incurable, we choose for ture the Great Screw, we incline ourselves over it, we enter it, we reinvent it each day, at every wine stain in the tablecloth, at every kiss of moss in the dawn of the Coru of Rohan, we invent our fire, we burn from the inside out, maybe thats choice, maybe words wrap this as a napkin to bread and within it is the fragrance, the flour fluffing up, yes without no, no without yes, day without Manes, Ormuz or Arimán, once and for all and enough.

Edit: stupid spelling.

[The Johnny]

Translated manually from Julio Cortazar's "Rayuela" (1963)

In tribute to Sepia and PD.