The Origin of the World (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
Pierre Michon
Language: English
Pages: 112
ISBN: 0300180705
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Ballets sans musique, sans personne, sans rien/Secrets dans l'Ile/Progrès
Whom the mayor of some little spot in the Dordogne, perhaps Eyzies, speaks without knowing it, that in his kiss he joins and welcomes beneath the eyes of the citizens whose hats are in their hands, on the eleventh of November, with his crib before a monument to the dead. The mayor of Les Eyzies perhaps thinks of them during the ringing of the bells for the dead. And it once was not uncommon to take these few to be shamans, to be as knowledgeable as socialist savants and as pious as Mohicans,.
Marooned Coppi. With so little Michon, all Michon had become doubly precious. But now a secret must be imparted. Fausto Coppi does not exist. Not in the sense that the route to the storage bunker in the boonies has been lost. Rather, there is no route, no bunker, no book at all. Bon, friend of Michon, fine fiction writer, cunning critic, confected the story of this embargoed story—meretricious publishers! lost masterpieces! alien corn!—as a gift to Michon, and to us. As the best gifts can, it.
Once and for all that man wasn’t born of Adam; such was the provenance of the case’s contents, as the labels affixed to each object attested, learned names calligraphied in a fine hand typical of the time, a beautiful hand, vain, rounded, cluttered, ardent, a hand they all shared, the fools, each group more modest than the next, those who believed in Scripture and those who believed in mankind’s glorious tomorrows; but the case held artifacts from our century as well, however stingy by.
Comparison; how the calligraphy had suffered at Verdun, how the calligraphy had fallen to ashes, to spidery scrawls, in the hells of Poland and Slovakia, in infamous camps not far from Attila’s own but which made Attila’s look like schools of philosophy, fields of beets and watch-towers that neither God nor man would have use of again; and despite Verdun and the Slovakian fog, the teachers, without this fine hand, had continued all the same, heroically in a sense, to put long names on little.
Of fallen trees and leaping from ditches upturned by the plow, children collecting them on a road and carrying them to school under their bonnets, in their little Wallachian hats, and with a sweet smile offering them to a teacher well versed in such things, interested in them, held in their weak little hands, these bits of darkness. That accomplished, they sit, slip off their schoolbags, and unwind by shuffling their feet, tipping their braids and necks over pages where little rabbits show them.