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Country Unsalvageable

by Jean Clamence

My country, country unsalvageable, land of the savage, nobody knows pain better than the wells of your history.

    For when we had arrived a thousand years back, and discovered fertile land, children grew into flowers and knew no war.

    But can't you see the state of your country as it divagates into mere colonies?

    But do you not notice the bleakening hues of the wind and the sky?

    But is it that you seek no salvation for our countrymen cast aside?

    Our ancestors beheld as barbarians for singing

Childhood resembling the barracks of uniformed men without ever beginning

Suddenly your son is taken

And your girls have fled

Outside the fields they believe boys are to men

    And anywhere, there should exist no women.

You preach that your color surpasses my own.

Surpasses?

Surpassed?

Surpassing?

Was it not you who marched home a legion of dead men?

Was it not you who failed to return to me my home?

Is it not you who enslaves?

Enslaved?

Enslaving?

A tale of a nation

Of cheats and liars

Hands soiled with gold

My country,

My country unsalvageable is just as old.

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The fault which hovers over my sleeping density lies brokenly not in the comedy of my being stone-faced but in the tragedy that I feel intensely behind it.

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L'amour Comme Salut

I love you for reasons,

sentimental and old.

They are classical,

much like snow.

Much life myself, in a way

and much like your gaze.

Although I grow withered,

and believe I might sing smothered,

your beauty never falters,

your song never halts.

Although I shed skin,

and predict that I will emaciate until thin,

your heart never hinders

from pecking my face,

from my gently smoothing over my lips, while I wring to hide my head in disgrace,

from tracing my elevated cheekbones,

from nuzzling in my neck,

from seeking meek shelter in my hair,

to kiss my forehead with a hundred of your sweet, innocent pecks.

Felt as you are,

beautiful as you are,

in your arms how can one criticize a trembling man from quivering much more?

How can one ostracize a man suited in the fresh remnants of his own blood to flush, forever onwards, much more!

A curious effect you bring!

Eternalizing, softening,

cherishing, spirit!

Glistening faith,

hopeful happiness!

Kind fawn, warm embrace!

Your arms are the only place I'd like to lay!

To be buried at last, deep inside your heart,

there I will decay.

But do not weep,

when it comes—that final day.

You have not lost me,

I have only written my name in the black felt,

the black lace,

which dawns above your head,

as you send me off at my last passage.

How I love you as if you are the last I have saved of myself!

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In the midst of endless, seemingly ineradicable self-loathing and misanthropy, I opened my eyes to find myself laying lifeless in slender arms, under the liberating surveillance of a warm gaze.

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A Reign of Sickness

I have been lying. I have deceived myself and my being. There is nothing which fills my unfulfillment. Fulfillment seems ever so usually to hurry away into the winding spiral of madness. All there is left in that inside which vigor once resided has died out, and the flat, dull, layers of flesh is being tattered and churned like raw meat. There is excitement—but it is downcast and deluded. One only meets it when intoxicated. Earlier, I felt senselessly lost, and realized that I was only recollecting something senselessly true: that I was alone, that my loneliness, my breath, my everything did not matter. And that is how you are able to ascertain of your becoming weak—when you begin to shiver at the thought and state of loneliness, at the height of disillusion; when the urge to duplicate yourself clamors at you as though you must do it, and have your clone listen to you as if he were yourself yet an entity purely separate from yourself. One falters when terribly afraid of loneliness, and weeps into one's pillow for love, rest, silence, peace—all these forms and stylistic attributes of death. To bring up to one the question of carrying on to live, there is writing, literature, art, which is a sort of diversion from proper suicide. I am only a reign of sickness.

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“Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. No animal in England knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.”

—Old Major (Animal Farm, George Orwell)

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White Nights (1959) - Directed by Pyryev Ivan

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How strictly lawless people trust that life is lawful! And how strictly lawful people trust that life is lawless! The truth is, life is either something or nothing but we will never know what it is with precision and clarity. Our conclusions and "truths" of life derived from observation and contemplation are, in reality, scarcely approximate answers. Most philosophers are aware of knowing nothing. In spite of the fact, they continue to live. For what else can they do but live, if they prefer not to die?

«To do nothing but exist passively, with your mind entirely isolated from the external is to simulate death.»

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—Nausea, Jean-Paul Sartre

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“To talk about real life, they have conjured nascent assumptions about me and have told captivating lies solely, I suppose, because they have neither time nor great will to seek an understanding of me within themselves. They believe and nearly ascertain to themselves in a conceited manner that I have passed, although I have simply torn off my mask. But, is it righteous to blame them for wanting security? What would convince a happy, strictly practical man to stand on the tip of a cliff—and not to merely tower over it, but to jump into the abyss that gradually and gravely shows him an arranged accumulation of silent, convulsing uncertainty and crackling unease, reminding him he is all alone, that for the time being he must listen to his heart throbbing and his teeth jittering at the approaching gloom as his eyes descend its hollow pipe?”

—An excerpt from my unfinished book; Ma Lumiére

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I often find myself unable to share the simplest of my truths with those whom I've confessed the most profound of my secrets.

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- Vladimir Nabokov

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Home may be the only prison of which I am required to be indebted to as long as there is enough warmth in my body to prove I am alive. However a stranger I may be to the intense, affectionate feelings of familial love, I cannot, adhering to the prohibitions of moral gratitude, escape it. This weight of family, and of all those involved in my above well pecuniary upbringing will not spare my very last breath. I am very certain it lives in my shadow under the light, meekly, intently following behind me as I walk with continuous consternation. But in the dark it does not merely lurk; it transforms, becomes all-consuming, encompasses me, engrosses me in it's shade. This grandness is incongruous with my genuine ability to feel for them. It ties me down with a sturdy rope and pours maddening guilt atop my head. Do you know, can you imagine to what extent it can drive one to insanity to see ones mother scrub, clean, and sweep tediously all day, sweaty and uncouth, repugnantly fat, yet not feel any love for her, when you know your unique numbness is abnormal and horrid?

Although I fleetingly feel from the bottom of some wretched, nascent phantom heart that I must repay my debt as it has already showered me with such rosy feelings, its effort is ultimately useless as no such externally imposed feelings of mine last.

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This heinous convolution of our society has led to an enormous outrage of materialism, inauthenticity, and a rather depressing absence of—especially for these unconscious crestfallen prisoners, the zombie-like people of this era exceedingly stolen of humane feelings and characteristics by humanity itself—the strongly needed fantastic, positively imaginative creativity of thought. The structures of our modern world has induced a widespread neglect of the liberating essence of the soul and regularly offends and rebukes those introspective people who seek to indulge in it.

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L'ange Qui Pleure Près de Mon Lit

The Angel That Weeps by My Bed

A Poem by Jean-Clamence (me)

The angel that weeps by my bed

plunges her head into the wrinkled blanket near my bed stead.

The angel mutters and whispers wistfully, perhaps she has been forlorn by human touch;

However she, in her pitiful state, still seeks for a hand to clutch.

She wails until the night is through,

restively writhering her hands around as she faintly pants, too.

Her nerves are shaken terribly,

thus she cannot help being drenched in perspiration, so wet and oily, so greasy, to such a grave extent that she dampens every fiber of the blanket completely.

Then, at the crack of dawn she slips away,

and will not return as long there is day,

for she has been biffed by harsh gazes,

and thus only desires to brood in dark spaces,

hiding from the crowd of peasants' thrashing faces.

Oh angel, why weep by my bed?

Why shiver in this cold together with I, who is irredeemably misguided?

The purpose of your presenting yourself to me and wailing at my feet is not to save me, of that and possibly only that in this world I am certain.

But, tell me; must I truly be the chosen one to save you and to deliver you from your unbearable burden?

Then, shall I brandish a knife, reach out for your wings, and clip them?

I may not end your misery, I may not overjoy you, and I may not satisfy your desire to act on a playful whim,

but I am letting you be free with me, much unlike your being forbidden of life, constantly being tugged at your skirt's hem.

So please, do not manipulate yourself to believe in what you perceive to be illusory and inhuman.

So please, stay! I beg of you as a mere man.

Do not desert me.

I would not want to be greeted with sorrow upon my waking,

discovering that you have flown away from me

and returned to Him.

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La Femme Impeccable

The Impeccable Woman by Jean- Clamence (me)

You are wonderfully angelic.

Your touch is irresistibly surreal.

Whenever we are alone together, I feel intensely hedonistic.

I feel myself renewed; loving you endlessly, never resisting or submitting an appeal, willingly walking away from what is real.

In a way, you are the tangible soul of a full life and everything in it's pursuit;

Both in sadness and in madness, in dysphoria and euphoria, your very fingertips hold fine life—the sick and healthy present of this vast, meaningless human existence.

I sometimes even question myself; 'Why is it her I make my muse?'

I sometimes even find myself answering 'no' to the question 'Is this life of no use?'

There is a gentile, sensible, exquisitely distinct atmosphere which floats about your being and draws me as a deserted nightlight attracts a sole moth.

I run to you mindlessly, mechanically, following a fluttering beauty so full of life as a cat does, seeking the delightful enrichment of my soul which I have only ever found in you.

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Emerging from the shadows, essence draws over everything as a curtain draws over a window.

Although, I do not miss the view, I am doleful at being stripped of the light which only the window could provide me.

I may never be able to move the curtain again. Should a miracle or some powerful mysticism happen, granting me the ability to move the curtain aside once more, the light which flows in will be new, and will never be, as it once was, familiar again.