NOTEBOOK II

Notebook II: The Harvest

06/19-21/96

To wipe off, with the palm, its cover: to this new notebook, the field, from which the harvest of implacability of the previous one is expected, such an act may present an indulgent introduction into, so witty, keeping me company. ("Again the feast, the speech, the glee, the shade of passing thought, the wealth of words and wit", Tennyson. A verbis ad verbera). Uprooted like classical wheat in the modernism of the summer, a bit more golden (tied up by the intimate crouching of laid down rye), it will get ready for co-operation. (Realschule & Rathaus: School subjects and Townhall rules of life). Layer by layer - to plant a melon, pumpkin and squash, reminescence and dream, sheaves, clover and buttercups, an empty room, a walk on its floor (the desolate echo above the strides), until a solution is brought forth (until it is plowed anew with the abundance of solitariness). ("A man that sits still is said to be at liberty because he can walk if he wills it", Locke). To pick crop obtained in such a way, to stack it onto hay-stack of disbelief. (In the course of time, to draw near such a procedure with an increased verity. Mucho en el suelo, poco en el cielo). To present both the sowing and harvesting as the only possible, any other work of that nature (besides that it wouldn’t be credible) would have nothing to do in this field-notebook - its benevolence is reserved for the pen carved out of a supreme sword. (Athanasius against the world - Athanasius contra mundum). It is only his mind which is entered by the thought to plow all of that, to pull it out (uproot it), to, instead, plant only himself again - using the blade of understanding for the farming work expected from him in the dry season.

* * *

The thing is that from an uncertain morning like this, it is going to burst forth an unmistakable day (hour by hour of imressive sharpness, the immobility of truth) - don’t unobscured objects shrink from the obscured ones, at least as much as it is necessary to be more restrained? (Like Ormuzd, the good spirit of Persians who was opposed by the evil spirit Ahriman according to the Zoroastrian religion, the n-th version of such a normal, boring antagonism). The unambigous and ambigous, cautious and reckless, discreet and straight, hearty (almost intimate) and held back: they walk in pairs (hand in hand) in the court’s garden under the window (framed by the wormy oak-wood). [There, it spies upon them the spirit of Nessus, a centaur who carried off Deianira, the wife of Hercules, but was stopped by a poisoned arrow shot by Hercules while Deianira, deceived by the dying Nessus into believing that his blood would serve as a love charm, later gave Hercules (sending it by Lichas) a shirt which she had steeped in the blood - the residual poison had such an agonizing effect that Hercules put an end to his life, and Deianira hanged herself in remorse]. Objectification (and its subliminal effects) as the predominancy of the upbringing here - it breaks down under the mediocre variety (differentiation) of the world in the lawn at the ground floor level, under the scrutinization of the connoisseur leaning out of the window at the first floor: a beetle (and a burrowing beetle) started in a rush to dig under the root of inadequacy as if it was their last digging. (Like Captain Bluntschli, a Swiss officer in the Serbian army in the WWI, portrayed in B. Shaw’s play ‘Arms and the Man’, a realistic soldier more concerned for his chocolate rations than for bravado, with such a practicalness having inspired Oscar Strauss to dedicate to him the light opera ‘Chocolate Soldier’). Wherever to look: one pulls to his side, the other to his, they unite only during a pause, on a bench. Fas est et ab hoste doceri. In front of everyone there lays his road, he avoids the other ones while sliding down the melodramatics of his. (On another road the things would not look like these anymore, destined to be on his - like Meursault, the Outsider in the, so-called, existential novel by Albert Camus - appalled he realizes that a man, even in the hardest moments, is not fully, to the end, unhappy; at the next instant, however, having fallen under the chisel of Sculptor, the constellation on the South Horizon of the Northern Hemisphere, with a relief he finds that it is not true, having divided himself forever to Snow and Iodine). Through all these differences, nevertheless, there bursts a common purpose. (To assume an air of importance - faire l’homme d’importance). The purpose of everything is to, given the shortage of the tenants’ authenticity, present itself as attractively as a kitchen does - an ideal stove on the cross-section of the streched senses, eternity impressed with details of a spontaneous oblivion, a feast of inspiration as a diploma of culinary trade, act of the arms delivery according to the rules of Developmental Biology (Embriology) (and a golden finger on the trigger - faire bonne mine). Having achieved the goal (having stretched itself to both sides of the window so much that it, fed, became invisible), the unquestionable permanency, with its mind at ease, sneaks out of the daily subversion of dwelling, uprooting from it the last tuft (a traitor’s voice about the mute flow of each of these hours) of the news about far niente - doing of nothing.

* * *

(The Concert Hall). It is also heard, besides the described ones, a periodic, silenced sound. [The doubling of the rhythm, (tread + foresight) in a puppet theatre]. It comes from the fridge, out of the corner between the wall, the ceiling and the back of the head - it cannot be determined more exactly since it springs from Ea, the Babylonian God of the atmospheric deep in which the world floats, and of the ocean, rivers, and streams, whose commands are carried into effect by his son Merodach. It reminds of train of bon vivant: the accelerated departure from pauperism and decelerated arrival to immovability (Borgen macht Sorgen); it is also a reminder of the creaking of sleepy souls: the entire night they travel to the other world, or the travel is about to begin, so they try to fall asleep before the tunnel. (Bon soir). It originates from the written-off state of the chair (telephone, pot), then curves on the floor (stops, becomes still), utilizes the skill (uses the skillfullness) - by the evening it unravels the song (while the sky, speechless, stares at it) of Daedalus, an architect of the Cretan labyrinth who escaped his imprisonment by means of wings invented by himself. (His son Icarus accompanied him, but was drowned). Not turning on (in the minuscule, transitor-like way described on the first page) radio and television set (the boxes that have been so well grinned into the century of blabbing), having put them away in the closet (the bigger box) of the blabbing century, it is good to hear this sound in the apartment - we understand each other. Its duty is to sing (even if in a coarse voice) something from the repertoire of a lone man, mine to, in return, for both of us, pay the bills: rent, electricity, and water. Non sibi, sed omnibus. It placed itself at my disposal (loyal devoir), it even mentioned setting up a concert, gratefully collecting the little crumbs of my considerateness. Loyauté, n’a honte. Until the blow of the wind opened until then the open ajar window, dove through (ready for everything) morning, rubbed against the plate and spoon (washed last night) so that one of them hit the other and, having thus clinked, drove away the audience reduced in a holographic manner to a group of the tenants behind the bars of the residence full of the extras (unspoken words), the stage workers (grammatical rules), and the scores of the formal owner of the notes of the sound in question in the case of an effective apatrid. Lucidus ordo.

* * *

06/24-26/96

The longest day, the day before yesterday, went by: while it pales, the daily shadow gets longer, first hardly noticable, then all the more persuasively. As always in cases like that, the cause of the change is in going too far - the days contributed to the turning-point by crossing their half. ("He spoke and then confronts the bull", Dryden). In differentiation between things, whoever or whatever dares to have more than it belongs to it, sooner or later (inevitably) it will back up and excitingly lessen. (In medias res. In medio tutissimus ibis). Oscillating in length, temperature, humidity and correctness, days acclaim to the generalized instability: instead of cake, fickleness as the only constancy is served to them after dinner. ("The consistency of bodies is divers; dense, rare, tangible, pneumatic, volatile, etc.", Bacon). Having prolonged themselves too much (believing to Milton: "Shun the bitter consequence"), the days could not expect anything else - having hit the ultimate degree, they caused it to slowly (and inexorably) squeeze them around the noon full of haughtiness (around the waist of chirping). Nothing comes for nothing - Rien n’arrive pour rien. Overheated - they start to cool, dry - a shower will get them; they leave the suspicion and irresoluteness to the morning birds (they feed the dough of the dawn with the little crumbs of inner peace). ("Despair is a certain consignation to eternal ruin", Taylor). And when, full of the important events and necessary form, they free themselves from descriptiveness, they are going to find their place in the length of assured hours of attentiveness, copying the saying: I wrote these lines, another has borne away the honour - Hos ego versiculos feci, tulit alter honores.

* * *

Residing in the room as in a game of words, the sight cedes to the hearing: I count more on the sense of hearing than on seeing. (Sound fell on a cliff, underneath the light terrace of Cadmus, a Phoenician Prince who slew a dragon and sowed its teeth, from which sprang up armed warriors who fought one another until all but five were killed and he, with these five, founded Thebes in Boeotia and introduced the alphabet in it. Chevalier d’industrie). The fixity of the abode doesn’t offer to the eyes anything which they (even closed) don’t see - the stay in it is based, before all, on hearing. (It is heard how, blind, there wanders about Bellerophon, a former rider of the winged horse Pegasus, on which he tried to fly to heaven after killing Chimarea, but fell and wandered about blind until his death).

Eavesdropping the openheartedness of Daphnis, a Sicilian shepherd, son of Mercury and inventor of pastoral poetry, a goatherd in love with shepherdness Chloë, loading the 3^rd-century novel by Longus into the wagon of life stories, it is realized that the (rustic) sounds come from ouside (from inside there comes nothing - the mystery umasked by the bordering of the pavilion centre, fundament of urban upbringing). According to those, outer sounds, it is concluded that the world (unwillingly and, because of that, monotonously) still functions: the firefighters’ sirens or, all the same, the police sirens, mildly stretched by the tune of the new and yet dizzy summer, suffocate in the beauty of the mechanical rescue, in the invisibility of Demogorgon, a mysterious evil divinity in the visible world.

Carefully rinsed with last night’s rain, dressed up to a local perfection of the abyss at the bottom of the flowery field of Deucalion and Pyrrha, a man and his wife who alone survived a deluge and became originators of a new race of men, a certain murmur of the world breaks through the walls of the residence as the final result of the head (cogito, ergo sum): its only palpability, exempting the sounds of the raving walk in a circle, around blamelessness.

* * *

Regardless of how much it arises from nothing, a thought ends up with (results in) something. [It rears (on its hind legs) as if for it there waits Nebo, the Babylonian God of science and literature, the Prophet who proclaimed the mind and will of Merodach, the first-born of Ea and Bel; only later, when it is not able to return, it realizes that it didn’t stir from the earth].

Even if it (the thought) would be caught (by bare hands) in the beginning (while in the embryo), and placed under the microscope (a magnifying doubt), it would again (grown up like poultry) pull out like a pullet and flew into the squeezed superiorinferiormaxillary jaws of the compromitted researcher forcing him to, without a blink, say the anticipated sentence about crassamentum, chant the lucrative verse about Midas, the King of Phrygia, who, having obtained from the gods the gift of turning everything he touched into gold, found in it a curse: Apollo gave him ass’s ears for deciding a musical contest against him. [To explain, later, why out of all, he (the thought researcher) said/wrote the caprice of his thought rather than his own, he would be unable, ex animo].

Articulation (speech, writing) in the hands of the unknown force - since early morning it wraps around him (the ostensible owner of that all), dictating the conditions for today’s surrender. Their relationship reduces to a duel in which he repeatedly and increasingly uninterested loses, in the end goes to Medamothi, an island whose name in Greek language means Nowhere.

And yet (exceptis excipiendis), changing his tactics, he only pulls tight its rein (spurs its head), adjusting it (his thought) by wrapping it with a wish, while actually entering the scuffle with something much bigger and longer, orderly stacking the ephemerality of the day onto the pile of the stings into the alleged sky.

* * *

06/27-29/96

Putting down the dates, writing them after a brief struggle with the matinal inveteracy of the day (it’s so early and yet - already unchangeable), more or less fastened to the certain order of things (finally in alliance with something resolute and firm) - I bring into the question neither backing nor change, I only (like a country under an embargo) fall in their incurability of solitariness. Trying to support himself by anything else (including shorter everlastingness as manageable self-deceit), a man in my place would have an even worse time. If he doesn’t believe that, let him set sail to Anticyram, where he will get hellebore (Helleborus) to cure him of his madness - Naviget Anticyram. The only point of support which is being offered: entering the dates into the orderly carved (like the enamelled dogma) partitions of impartiality (one compartment - one date), arranged according to simple math and painted in the same, latticed result. (A cage as a tiger fur and Fauna, the Goddess of animals, as a key for the cat). The dates as the frame of the remaining picture. (That in its center, a treat of the focus, a mirror emulsion is set is doubtless - the repetition of characters and events is far from the end. Nature does not make a leap - Natura non facit saltum). It is known: one (date) will come after another; at the first tremble of this one there sets in that one; if this one gets carried away too much (becomes relaxed), there jumps in that one (arranging itself in the centre although, as recently as yesterday, it couldn’t be found even in the corners). By itself, the change of one date by the other installs confidence with its continuance of the uncompromising state of alteration, sews it in the collar on the coat of cleared off suspicion, pours in its pockets the change left from the transaction with the post-fascist epoch, resists Favonius (the west wind), the onomatopoeia (imitation) of Zephyrus from the diagram of a flower (the Stamen above the Petal, the Stigma and the Style in the Pistil from which there drinks Flora, the Goddess of Flowers) - and there, in the flower shop, it dies in the fineness of the day.

* * *

(A Pair). Two older men they are: sometimes they park their cars next to each other, that’s the end of their acquaintance - I’d say that they do not know one another. (Somehow, both cars are still in running condition, as their owners are, but it is uncertain for how much longer, as, again, is the case with them). Their cars, therefore, are old, dented in many places, the rust feverishly, although not yet fully, disintegrates them, from all that time they became colourless - became identical with their owners. But, one old man is somewhat more lively in his act, he’s got more vigorousness in himself, while the other looks more spent, he doesn’t even have a hand (he puts his sleeve in the right pocket of his worn out jacket and walks like that across the parking lot towards nothing, hoping that, at least today, he’s going towards something). The one who’s more jumpy, while leaving his car or approaching it (these are the only moments when one can be seen here), does it without hesitation, at that he sharpens his step a bit, fitting it into his haste, it is obvious that not all of the remaining incitements and tricks left him. In contrast to him, the other one is not in a hurry, his gray or the light brown suit is quite wrinkled, it flaps in the wind which works on clearing off even the last possibilities and yet only it, in passing, rubs against him, confirming that he still exists, although already downright unnecessary.

That one parks his car so that later he leaves the spot by backing up, while the other, more strutting one, always first manoeuvres to park in such a way so as to later drive out from the spot going forward - in this they differ too. The only similarity between them, besides their age and shabby cars, is in that it looks like neither one of them has a wife - they’re, perhaps, widowers, perhaps bachelors, although other variants are equally possible. One lives in the building in which I live, the other in the neighbouring one. (In mine is the one who has both hands). The more melancholic one, without both a hand and a stimulating haste, maybe has a disability pension, maybe not. As it has been said, his clothing and footwear are (if not completely tattered) ratty, although roses do not blossom to the one from my pavilion either - it looks like he, in his late life, still works: briskly, he hops (probably to the workplace of his), and in the same, swift, manner he returns (it must be close). He is, perhaps, a keeper of something, somewhere (he’s got such an instict, like a bird), and, because of that, he’s on his guard - he doesn’t slow down as voluntarily as the moody one who, likely, for a long time hasn’t been maintained by such a duty. Both of them, without even having a presentiment about it, are typical representatives - one of the flaming, the other of the burnt experience. With that, they perfectly complement one another, making the cosmic cross-section a perfect one. The only thing that is missing there (besides the hand of that old man) is a light rowboat to launch it in the closest river and, like a dissident couple, escape from this community at last, each of the two for his own reasons but, more than anything else, because of the absurdity which they, as well as me, of course, with the unpardonable authentic fullfilling of their roles, were brought into.

* * *

A travel-record or a diary (I question myself as if it is not the same, par complaisance) are the map and the second of each of these writings - for something more there lacks the time (and once real countries), for less - too strong of words were used. If the diary made its participation doubtful by too strong of a counting of the identical hours, days, months, and years, the travel-record is left to pluck up courage over a demolished bridge to a one-time tempestuous understanding. (Reduction to ashes in majestic stillness - live coals poured over with preciousness of the past kitchen, confining the adversary by means of the rein: this record is a proposition for such an act). From the circular flow of things - ascent is inevitable. As when it was started from that which resembles this, and arrived to the aguish break with the bank-church prison of the world, the inexcusableness of Idea which, cheated by its interpreters, before our eyes turned to a lie. (He who excuses himself accuses himself - Qui s’excuse s’accuse). The chastity of a journey (peak of the outcome), the basis of the suspicion (the groundlessness of the sweet talk), critical thinking as the slip-knot for lightness, the nakedness of the boredom and pomposity of the bareness (the aristocracy of the spirit and the bloatedness of a body), the fall of Dägän (the God of the earth) from the provincial heavens, Dädäism of Tristan Tsara (the shot of V. Mayakovski’s crown into a beauty that pulls down) - they were making the very mentioning of the destination, and (however vague) road to it, more powerful than the (corporal) arms at the adversary’s disposal. [Whenever he (the adversary) won - his body won, whenever he lost - his soul lost]. That is why this war won’t be lost either. (Damon’s rejection by wreath of Pythias, by the courting of the former Syracuse, by the olive-tree as by passableness of the scorching heat, by pouring off of the rabble into the sea of coarseness). Armed with the compass of the live and the word of the fallen ones, the fighters this unit consists of (a squad: the subsequence of Winter in the firmness of Summer, a Spring habitué), protagonists of the universal blow of the boiled masses, will fill the diary with their travel-record and vice versa according to the rules of those freed from the economic-religious (pseudo)functionality, brought up by the strict form of doubt. Salus populi suprema lex est.

Obsessed With Law and Order

06/30/96

We reached downtown A., the state capital, and as soon as we parked our car in a steep, side street (the one from the photographically revived, and because of that the unfaithful, picture about that kind of street, shaded by a late basswood and inattentive humming of a double-lined eternity upon the curbed suburb of the city of B., covered into a phosphatic laziness of a glaring afternoon), a police car suddenly appeared at the beginning (the base) and a policeman on a motorcycle at the end (the peak) of that, rather short street, and stopped traffic quickly.

What’s wrong, what happened, we were asking ourselves, having come out of the car and walking up the street towards its intersection with another, wider street, where the uniformed motorcyclist, having gotten off the motorcycle, was already talking into a microphone of his radio.

Approaching the intersection, we noticed one or two young men, wearing orange arm-bands and dressed in shirts of the same colour - they were finishing laying down the traffic cones, usually used for traffic regulation during road constructions. We asked them what this was all about. They said that in a few minutes there would be a marathon run held on the wider street and that, due to that, the side streets were closing for traffic, until the runners completed the race.

It turned out, when they arrived and ran by, that they actually were children and a few of their parents, that is, that this was not a marathon in the real sense of the word, although to those kids this mile, mile and a half, seemed probably like a long track. The run was for charity, a local radio station and the city newspaper were the sponsors, contributing some money to the cause, it was a beautiful sunny day, without wind, all in all, during the several minutes by chance we were present at a nice, humane happening. (We came here without planning anyway - my younger daughter and son drove up the previous day for a visit, I wanted to take them out, that’s how we got there).

When the race finished, we walked to the main square - there already was set up everything in connection with the show, full of performers, salesmen, audience. But this story is not about that, that’s only a pastoral background, a frame of a more important picture, a charming introduction to its essence, which follows.

While we were, between two, three people, who also accidentally came across the street where the bunch of kids completed their run (having turned around on its top and returned to the starting point), watching a couple of volunteers who, in a haste, were moving, fixing, or simply dramatizing over something (there is a lot of that around here, especially in such, rather unimportant situations, yet full of attentive rightness), it stood out that, amidst all of that, with his corpulency, authoritativeness, gait which does not tolerate remonstration, short and stern words which he was uttering into the mike of his transmitter radio, that is, with his figure and intonation, over all that scene there dominated, in a disproportional manner, the policeman who just dismounted his motorcycle, having leaned it, in a move worthy of a tango dancer, almost foppishly, against the curb (so much so that one could think that, in the dynamics of the circumstance, however now unconvincing because of the peacefulness of everything, and due to the hurry and urgency of something, now inconceivable either, he unconsciously threw it away), and then, having suddenly risen up, started establishing control over that piece of asphalt and a few idling spectators on it.

It was Saturday or Sunday (one of them), the government offices and private companies were resting before starting a new cycle of the same things on Monday, so that, not only on this portion of the run track, the streets were empty. And yet, not letting anything take a chance, this man wouldn’t let anything puzzle him, on the contrary, he was quite occupied with showing his zeal - the immortality of duty, although in a (described) sort of vacuum.

His perfectly shined boots, with their straight rather than wrinkled upper parts, were glowing in the sunshine as it was his, almost an astronaut’s, at any rate like Norma [a constellation half-way between Ara and Wolf (Lupus)] white helmet, and as were his, reflecting, sun glasses of the colour of a dimmed smoke, from which the sun rays were irrevocably (probably in a panic) bouncing off by now, at the very end of an 8 minute long journey. (From the Sun to the Earth the light travels some eight minutes, having traversed about 149 million kilometers. Reflected back is, mainly, the world-wide gloom, here and there a bit of honour flashes too).

He had a somewhat bigger but still decent and healthy belly, exactly of the shape and size that, when he would straighten his back (and in such one, victorious aura, he was while continuously striding up and down his sector, ringing with the shod hills of his, almost storming boots), he’d disperse all the doubts about trying to joke with him, especially when, from time to time, gently as he would probably do to his wife, he’d caress the handle of his impressive revolver at his tightened belt, and move his firm beard a bit more up.

Black boots, black slacks, black shirt with short sleeves, all mercilessly tightened, almost shooting (so much so that even the gun itself has become superfluous, like cruches to a devil - le diable boiteux). And unavoidable, short trimmed moustaches, as prescribed by order and rule, from the Hollywood’s representation to the local regulations about the appearance of such one representative (guardian) of the law, personification of the official statute of virtue, aware that a beauty without virtue is like a flower without perfume - la beauté, sans vertu est une fleur sans perfum.

The resting but ready motorcycle (impatience of the crankshaft disguised in nickel), as the assumed tool for maintaining controllableness over society impressed by a machine (of the undoubtful features of a wheel), crouched in expectation of the policeman’s decision about starting it, increases the importance of his hastiness, spreads a straw mat under the decision of le roi le veut type, contributes to the sureness of the respect to the mechanical-biological complexity of such understood and projected law and order.

Sharply and attentively looking behind his unpredictable and, certainly, Röntgen sun-glasses, in the direction of the rare and unimportant human beings, looking, therefore, at those volunteers taking care of the track and us, a few accidental passers-by and, obviously, surprised with the tiny response in front of such powerful looks and accessories, he coughed a bit, with his hands in black leather gloves without fingers, to enable a close contact and better manipulation of the handlebars and control knobs of the dazzling apparatus, he wiped off his forehead which got sweaty under the weight of the padded and impregnated helmet and, as the race was over and his duty at that place came to its end, he stepped towards his motorcycle, forcefully lifted it up, sat down on it, started the motor and properly sitting (not leaning to either left or right), hovering therefore, stiff like a golden mean (juste milieu), all of a sudden he took away the chapter about the proper and allowed - a shake of the, here otherwise rare, accacia tree, its experienced yawn, was almost felt in the air. (A tree, too, knows what jus gladii is, I thought).

"Obsessed with law and order", said my son to me over the phone during our recalling that detail, talking about the nature of this society, the contents of its movies and newspapers, apprehension of life.

But, given that this is their country, they arrange and make it as they think it’s best for them (more exactly - for those who in all that have more interest and influence, in other words for the ruling class).

The problem is in that such a choice of theirs (such their feature) for a long time already, they sickly (and what Empire wasn’t like that?) apply outside of their country. (Lex loci = Lex terrae - The law of a small place = The law of a whole land, says in their instruction to the world’s flock).

Until, again, there shows up another policeman, with approximately the same shiny equipment and not a smaller belly, or until both services (of the rulers) get abolished by the third one, the peoples’. Lex talionis.

06/30-II/07/01-03/96

The book by Franz Kafka of the above title, due to which it is sold here in good numbers, while for other works by him one has to go to a university library, or see some passionate expert, a professional, a scrupulous researcher of rigorous obsession of the writer with impractibility of any metamorphosis except the one from the uneasiness of Gregor Samsa to persistent fixedness of the enlarged insect, is probably his worst book. Sa boule est demeurée. Having chosen this continent, what’s more the country of the same name, to jest in it about something (whatever that is), is a reflection of his, that is of Bohemian European deceivableness with something milder and lighter, almost vivacious and solvable and, according to that trick, in this country actually possible, versus deeply burried (and yet so visible) nonsense for which even he believed that it is present only in his country, town, office and apartment (because here, as per such an amateurish, above assumed supposition, in a promenade-like manner sewed up in an empty fable of "America", it is not present). Nothing close to joking around and jestering exists here. This country is even more serious than the majority of others. So much so that exactly with that, if with anything, one can establish an ironic relationship, Kafka’s parable about, in fact, provincial/quasi messiahship or immigrants’ parvenu state of mind, but not with Kafka’s approximative and simplified description of his hero’s adventures in the country whose name that story of his, as we’ve said, bears as its title.

Pretending not to improve Kafka in principle, which, after all, to a writer of his sensibility and penetration in the essence of things, one does not do with an easy mind and without a great need, I still pretend to use the same title (indirectly, of course) which he used for his, as suggested, the worst book, for this book of mine, if I could only contribute with my game of words as with small symbolism to, at least a part of, the spirit of that remarkable story teller about the abyss of absurdity and absurdity of abyss: we have chosen the same title for including under it (in my case) and excluding (in his) doubt, that is for the disharmony between the actual and imagined habitation. (As always: at one place is the known, at the other the unknown - l’inconnu). Kafka expressed his doubt where he was born and lived, while permitting Karl Rossmann, the hero from the novel in question, to use a more elastic, enterprising pace across the surface of the same granulation, only on another continent - he did not advise him to enter the depth bomb, they both relaxed, the black thoughts occurred to neither Kafka nor his hero, the writer reserved them for his surrounding (as, after all, I did for mine).

Among many prejudices about America (rejecting oversimplifications of any kind), that one - about the fluttering and victorious certainty of even those who, along the way, lost all which, by layman simpleness, is classified as "less" - is probably the most present one during the last couple of centuries (and, particularly, in this one), during which both the "cream" and the "rabble" left other continents to come to the country which handles illusions unsparingly and glitteringly (like in more quiet and dignified places a disdained circus would try to do), it even, by the standards of good taste too vociferously, throws them into the eyes of its own population (which, for its part, absorbs them faithfully, with small exemptions - exceptio probat regulam).

The majority in America are fairly open and curious (the minorities are, mainly, tied up with a prescribed kind of working and citizen proving although, especially at picnics, they also know how to fruitlessly burst out), but it is even more tightly drawn by the upbringing and Western Christianity taboos. How they all live, what they feel and hope for, is best known by their politicians (from two identical parties) to whom the "people" is alpha and omega in each of the gushes of their vocality (the kindergarden speeches, put together by their lawyer-secretaries, varying not more than about a hundred words, the sum of the wisdom and exclusiveness of the "intellectual" institutions of power such as The Rand Corporation and The American Enterprise Institution, while the speakers read them with a trained gesticulation and tragicomical pose, often powdered, although a great many of them, in spite of everything, are still not women). Since they (the politicians), of course, first take care of themselves, that is of the class which they are recruited from (and which, here, is not at all plebeian), then the people take care of themselves by working, mostly hard, getting new jobs after loosing previous ones, taking bank loans and paying them back (which, otherwise, both in this country and outside is called an American Dream, only it is not said that, in it, everyone is very much awake), serving both local and national interests believing (of course, not everyone) into proclaimed principles and, in all that, a substance is rarely reached (not even to mention, amidst such a pragmaticism, a possible philosophical stand): it is simply run through, like in disguised despair, but still milder, even ringing (for example, when they, like jingle bells, start screeching after winning money on a TV show or bingo). After all, in no country is everyone aware of, more or less, the same lie. Mundus vult decipi.

All humans hope and strive for something better and, at that, they often point the finger to the other side of the same river. This is, to a certain degree, natural and normal but it is insufficient, and even postponing, for the actual revulsion. Deceptio visus. America, probably, by the very act and factual state of the newly discovered possibility and refreshing escape, gained a precious, initial impulse which, as much as from its beginning being simplified, having in mind the vacillation of the contract of the collaboration between whatever fulfillment and complete charade, in the modern (and by so much instantaneous, thus elementary) psyche, projected itself as some uncorrupted salvation. Since there does not exist any salvation anywhere, and in particular not the uncorrupted one (there exists only the initial stroke and, then, the steadiness of reverberation as the acoustic solitariness of a being which, through the hanging of the rain drops on the window glass, is full of the faultless loneliness of the experienced observer of fragile constancy), it is not easy to give up some beloved lie. Thus, an approximativeness and facilitation in connection with this, relatively interesting, but even more uniform and tightly regulated country, even if only being a necessary pause between two polishings of the Castle of the famous writer, has no justification. Faux pas. Niaserie.

All the federal states, anachronic settlements (new-Babylonian metropolises), airports, highways and, in general, entrepreneurship’s swing (one certainly honest infrastructure), glare and misery, megalomania and minuteness, value and kitsch, might and debility, uninteresting majority and interesting minority (as, after all, everywhere), seeming individualism and obvious uniformity, the coasts, mid-west, south, and north, the abundant (in the sense of tera-giga-commercial) offerings of nothing (truth to say, sometimes of lucidity, again as is everywhere), the rigid stack-up spokesman of the government office [accompanied, though, with a giggling attitude of the universe (used to anything) towards this stiff individual, stiffer than appropriate even in the case that he himself created it (the universe)], mainly (if not exclusively) the materialistic interests in question, so much so that they are daily pronounced, emphasized and promoted [what an imperfection of declarative devotees (including the bigots), the followers of the (governmentally supported) guile about a heavenly kingdom, while the earthly one is ravingly and pedantically being ripped off and subjugated], finally: the bombardment and cruise missile attacks by the named country against a part of the country which, not remembering any longer why, I left a long time ago arriving here, resulted in that at the conclusion of all that I got alone in this room (caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt), in which I write these pages, not, of course, writing as much about this country (after all, and as in the case of Gavrilo Princip, it, too, is only an inducement while the real cause is "deep inconsistencies") as, which is always the only thing that remains, about myself. (An affair of honour - Affaire d’honneur). With the last Kafka and I are in an agreement, even though we have, at the occasion of taking the name of the same country for the title of two different contents, had a quarrel.

* * *

(Vacation). July: the middle of summer (and of vacations, in part of the world which succeeded there), and yet - so cautiously its middle peaks from the side. [It is in doubt (yellow and too yellow) which road to take. If it starts going through the old forest - it will fall asleep in the shadow of Hypnos, the God of sleep; if it decides to sail in a boat down the river - at the latest by noon it will sink into the lotus of Hyperion, one of Titans, equivalent to the Sun. But it has bigger plans]. I have no plan for July, Je vis en espoir. My vacation is 10 (working) days: 5 in August and 5 in December - I distributed them in such a way, thereby expressing my freedom. (Little wealth, little care - Poca roba, poco pensiero). In truth, the number of these days is small for my 25 years of working, but to the intellectuals, the so-called reformers in Eastern Europe, it does not occur that they themselves undergo such a self-discipline - it is not worth proving its charms to them as even the Biblical giants, Gog and Magog, wouldn’t be able to convince them to experience its advantages, even if offering to take them on their shoulders through London’s Guild Hall, the European reference of theirs (the "reformers’"), the museum display of, before anything else, their humbleness. Invita Minerva. Regarding myself, though, in July I’ll see to it to mix with the established opinion about the unreliability of the month for something more efficient and quicker: behind the road in the plains, the sunflower field increasingly tranquilizes, by then lazy anyway, the idea about a turning-point. (In summer months, the revolutions are characterized by long preparations and, because of that, the deeper catharsis; the winter ones are more sudden because they’re cold, they burst out over night, like a scherzo). The new month is going to inevitably bring something in (gracious, it will take something out), it will burn down the stack of days and nights without finishing its work; at the end, satisfied with itself, it will climb to the attic and fall asleep on the hay (shaken from the barn of loneliness), which it kept in reserve all the time, anticipating the trap prepared by August, à huis clos. In all of that, my vacation somehow reduces to a tidy consistence of Horae (in other languages known as the Hours), the deities in charge of the changes of the seasons (resulted from the actual calendar of sense, hung on daily inevitability) and with the reliable (firm) duration of each of July (or August) days it has only that common property of a final melting and disappearing according to a larger order, according to which there disappeared Hyacinthus, accidentally killed by a discus thrown by Apollo and from whom there sprang the flower hyacinth, belonging to the lily family, with long, narrow leaves and bells instead of calyxes on their tips. Repose as a tidiness of a result - netteté.

* * *

(The Beach). Such a nice (second in a row), high-quality morning but (still) neither a trace nor sound of a solution is in prospect. (It got lost, as if it’s been wanted by Orpheus, a mythical musician who could charm beasts, make rocks and woods move to his melody, and who, after the death of his wife Eurydice, having left for Hades in quest of her, with his music so charmed the infernal deities that they consented to let her follow him, provided that he did not look back until he and she had reached the upper world; Orpheus looked a moment too soon, and thus lost Eurydice forever). Neither something jumped out from the warmth of Notus (South wind), nor did it (the same thing) release itself from the authority of Odin, the Northern King of Gods and men, the God of war, in his court in Valhalla surrounded by fallen warriors and two ravens sitting on his shoulders, bringing him tidings of all that goes on in the world. The victorious march of a Resistance Movement is, again, postponed until tomorrow. (It hardly started and already the summer is stretching: from here to eternity - as in the movie). In other, more civil circumstances, one could order an ice cream, get mixed with civilized bathers on a nicely arranged beach of daily care - there is nothing of that this season again. Spa bathing in all-seeing water, downing the Sun through the dark green glasses (so that it resembles the burst-of-colour elder-tree, including Sambucus canadensis), the opinion exchange with a collected facilitator - all that would mean a lot but the water turned into a false prophet (patience passe science), the glasses focus parts out of the context of wholeness (quis custodiet ipsos custodes), instead of the facilitator a pursuit of the insolent quietness is heard (paritur pax bello). Handing over to one another the sobriety of Orion, a giant hunter who was blinded as a punishment, but recovered his sight by travelling eastward and exposing his eyes to the rays of the rising sun, the visitors of this beach throw a smile as their deposit into a steamed bed of the flare, (in the manner of a saint) like chldren they jump into the zenith wax, however they wipe themselves off with the hand imprisoned by work (with the other one, occupied by sketching the pause, they enter suplemental details), a large plastic ball, full of the free fall law, they throw over today’s obstacle to meaning, and (having turned on their side) they leave the hope of redemption aware of their heedlessness repeated today too, of their inconsiderate thanklessness in the sea of sympathizers, of the poured out state of layman bath in the spa of Pangloss, a philosopher in Voltaire’s Candide, with his conclusion that all is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.

The Mulberry Tree

There where the asphalt surface of the parking lot, shining splendidly in the grass (stylishly borrowed from the corresponding movie), in quietude and over-blossomed thicket, at last breaks off, on a slightly (so trifling) rising ground - a mulberry tree blackens. (Like Tara, the plantation home of Scarlett O’Hara, burned in the Civil War). Black like a feast, gnarled (a hawthorne mapped by embroidery hooks), with its fruit spread around the aristocratic base, it testifies about the restrained zenith which (this summer too, without penegyric) it goes through. Blackened, therefore, seedy, coupled kernels of a miniaturized cluster of Morus - the cone-shaped thimble of the mulberry, needed by no one given the abundance of so much other, official fruit, falls into the basis of the tree, into the other, rarer detritus, the unobtrusive part of the cycle for this season. As children, we had business to do with the mulberry tree: on a plebeian suburb of a simplified city in an elementary country on the rise; looking at this mulberry tree, I try to quickly find (before the dominant shadows of the evening settle down) similarities and differences between the two variants of one the same task abouth growth. This one (morus nigra) is black, the other one (morus albus) was white: in spite of such a difference, their colours come to them as something withdrawn (almost humble), something which is reason for neither standing out nor discontent. This one is deserted, the other one we climbed. This one is not eaten by anyone, of the other one, after our eating, hardly anything would have been left for a few domestic animals in the neighbouring yard. This one burns its days in silence - a madrigal made smoky by centuries of dismals (not even rare children solicit it, and from the people, made busy in proper gardens by their solitariness and indistinct purpose, it stopped expecting anything a long time ago); from the top of the other one, thrown over the cracked, half-demolished fence, there loomed a view of the hustle and bustle of the omnifarious (and omnicorporeal) Sunday morning, through which with a growing intensity there drained the density of insignificant talk, heard during the breaks of capricious music from the radios taken out to the windows somehow pertly, after returning from bakery with warm bread and an unambiguous impression of the farina as a final result of the exultancy, hang out between the laundry on lines of intelligibleness and the soup making before an important match played in such a state of things - the state of constant passion. (Virtue is always green - Virtus semper viridis). Our grandmother shouts: "Come on down from that mulberry tree at once" - in a moment or two, an entire partially analyzed period of life here it is, falls from the height on which there boils the essence, wisely predicting that the jump down is going to cost us dearly - having once landed, we will not climb that tree again, any other tree of similar use (including the one here, silenced like ocarina without lips, grown into exaggeration of Silenius - vino dentro, senno fuori - represented as a jovial, drunken, sensual old man, the companion of Bacchus), will serve only as half of a once sufficient possibility: its epitomizing, abrégé.

* * *

07/08-15/96

The summer increasingly stretches but, at that, it also contracts. (It tightens the mouth like apple brandy, but also loosens it: "Drink new cider, mulled with ginger warm", Gay). (This duality of its will finally cost it). It stretches by sinking the idea about escape (as always - from groundlessness to reason), and contracts by bringing the rumours (and doubt) into intention about revulsion. (It replaces Metazoa by Protozoa, covers with a single cell as with an agreement to a lower form, lesser trouble). Whether this summer is going to be remembered by anything else besides the standard conspiracy with a seasonably greater hope, it remains to be seen but even now one can foresee its applause to the fattering charm of one, after all, periodic phenomenon, full of meliorism - the belief that the world naturally tends to get better and, especially, that it can be made better by human effort (Webster) [so much so that even meliphagein, an Australian bird and a honey eater, wouldn’t rob it (the world) of its sweetness - there would be so much sweet left]. [All of its nights and days could be accommodated in that, hanged on a kitchen wall, calendar which I, truth to say, have not but which, more or less, is kept in that spot so that the unfinished time of theirs (a shot down, but endurable partridge) would have where to land - fugit irreparable tempus]. Although, too little occupied with essence, too much with form, we do not any longer remember that we went equally fast (and easy) through the past summers, they’re not of a short memory: even now, listen how they echo in the dead hour of indiscreet relaxation by the motionless backwater, wrap with pathetic fallacy of a swimming glory, ring like the bird over there [while downing them (from the habit), melted / look how they smoke, belted]. ("The fire of trees and houses mounts on high", Cowley). [They (the past summers) testify that the permanent change all of a sudden surprised us again, that it is worth writing an unpretentious feuilleton about it]. That is, they delude us comfortably, pretending that, even uncovered, their veiled state is their only remainder, guarding it like the Norse giant Mïmir, who guarded the spring of wisdom at the root of the cosmic tree Yggdra Syll. As if all the summers so far didn’t make us to, even unwillingly, accept the final break up with the calendar prediction about the seductiveness of the order, the acacia’s imitation of something larger than mimosa - towards this summer, too, we behave imprudently from its very beginning, letting it traditionally intoxicate us with the numbers of determinateness instead of the spontaneous sum.

* * *

(Indistinct Importance). Slowly but surely (first hardly visible, then all the more unyielding), the objects incautiously left to spend the night upside down, land on their feet with the old certainty and unstirred faith in proper landing. (The parked cars, unloaded truck, repaired roof, mowed grass, contempt assigned to a momentary weakness and, as if all this is not enough, the expectation of something indistinct and important, escaped from Pandemonium, the capital of Satan in Milton’s "Paradise Lost"). The characteristic lines of the world cross each other in all directions, upon the uncertain reason as upon the additional purpose. (Without doubting, they connect cause to effect, arranging themselves on the map for today, without objection of dogma as a municipal form of doubt. Another moment or two and the suspicion is rightfully going to submit itself to the crystal clear picture of the linkage between profitable and satiated, useful and nice, masterly sewed up step of Mylitta, the Assyrian Goddess of the moon, into the female walk of the principle of generation). All which is ready for strike puts the weapons aside - although until tomorrow it is going to embolden itself by the mere exultancy with justice, from condemnation to abolishment of the unpopular régime it will take no more than a mouthful of ego in conciliation with a little, the triumph of privation. (Corrigenda - a list of imperfections, can sleep well). Large parts of the same, sonnet stillness roll down the street like down the tractate about the superficiality of Pippa, a carefree, simpleminded girl from Browning’s poem "Pipa Passes", a little Italian silk-factory girl who influences unknowingly everyone she meets when she is singing happily on her way to work. {How little is needed for (until a moment ago the trembling base of) the morning to ceremoniously start [through the quick sand of the afternoon, the deaf-mute state of the scattering about, while switching from the vigorously shined sidewalk to the imperilled thought like to an unworthy remainder (caput mortuum)] to reverberate due to the sudden righteness of people, the pious pomposity of salvation, the indifference of forgotten shame}. The boiled psyche of a lone man, shrunk with united powers (conjunctis viribus) into a melodic massiveness of Raphael, an archangel introduced in the apocryphal book of Tobit, one of the books of the Old Testament Apocrypha, skillfully leaps over the fence of audibleness into a tastefully arranged, a shared apartment of a double thought of indistinct importance, with which everything started this morning but, halfway, it progressively retreated.

* * *

Not even with an early wake-up we can complete praising the days. (Haec olim meminisse juvabit). [As much as the elder Karamazov, a miserly, drunken roué, could not stop at having only three legitimate sons (Dmitri, a hot-tempered roisterer; Ivan, a self-doubting intellectual and nihilist; and Alexey, a gentle religious mystic), and so he had another, illegitimate son Smerdyakov, an epileptic who, finally, costed him his head]. [Having caught it in a surprise attack, we see it (the day) as it pours into the common messiness of the existing solution, philanthropically pompous it arrives to the banquet of Thyestes, the brother of Atreus and the son of Pelops, where human flesh is served along with some pieces of Io, a Princess changed into a cow by Jupiter]. Looking around oneself, one still remembers the bluish, suggestive shadows of a summer morning on the threshold of a fine parchment - significantly sharpened, without unnecessary shades, the eternal pause blossoms (since then) for him from the other side of the fence with respect to this in which he finds himself now: a sort of a toothless state of the extinct mammalian Mylodon robustus, firmly leaned into the jaws of taciturnity of Lake Serbonis (now a dry bog in Egypt), in which whole armies were said to have sunk. From the day’s stipulation with the practicalness of a vulture (everything is to be recycled as long as it is not to be discarded - it glares from the bareheadedness of vultur), until all these days are stacked into a nicely arranged and carefully separated world for itself, no temperate conclusion can be drawn with which everyone would be satisfied and yet, all are fleeing from extremes: neither Kuvera nor Kama, the God of wealth and the God of love, would be able to stop them, nor would Kaf, a mountain that surrounds and walls in the earth. Partitioned by the days of a ram-like persistence, on that fence we do not assail, from time to time we only evade it listlessly, while making sure that, within the intervals of fittingness, it didn’t disintegrate into intangibleness of divine justice for which, so unsuccessfully there searched Joseph K., Kafka’s hero in "The Trial". If it (the fence) starts to ruin in some spot, instead of hurriedly going through it (to Beulah, the land of sunshine and delight, in which the pilgrims rest until called upon to cross the river to the Celestial City), we diligently repair it - the temptation of a rusty release (of galloping into a prosaic happiness) hardly started and yet it conciliatory fades and we again return to the prescribed amount of work, duty and perfection for today.

* * *

A state of the died out renegation (markedly oval by the circular highway S-W-S): the change of delusion of one with the other shines from where it was left. {Nicht wahr? it asks me instead of me asking it n’est-ce pas?, petting it on unbearable lacquer like on a room variant of Prometheus, a divine personage who brought fire from heaven to man, and was punished by Zeus, who had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where an eagle or vulture fed constantly on his liver, which was ever reproduced). Neither something changed nor was it reasonable to expect. [In nothing go too far - ne quid nimis - can be heard from the top of the civil tidiness, stacked into constituency of swollen equanimity (a layer of bombing, a layer of Christmas, a layer of puritanic seductiveness by the notion of parliamentary rules), there bursts nothing from the fullness of nonentity, drips from the tory’s snout of a labourist swine, dangling with democratic feet upon republican mud it grunts out of the lucrative self, sails with the small eyes out of the slipperiness of a being like from the ultimate equivalent of oil, the last thing it is ashamed of is the misery of expression and fleeing of words].

Although one, relatively unexpected change happened on the ceiling and the walls: cracked, they gave in to the rain in the absence of the trade people who, fixing the roof, took out shingles and went for breakfast as for a current comfort - a testimony to the sudden and decisive change, a caprice of incautiousness, its festivity.

Here and there, an eternal sharpness flashes, afterwards it, too, settles into a general result of the only possible outcome - the inevitable constancy, a thing already done (fait accompli). It cannot jump out of its own skin, whatever stand to take it spies upon its own self - it finds itself, always at a broken moment, in sleeplessness of Rhadamanthus, a King of Lycia, who for his justice was made after death a judge in the other world. Looking at first like a deserved acquiescence of exhuberance, the constancy (in its second move but without second thought) offers its services to the return: it patiently lets it be known that it is about time to break up with that - one is required to go (or to return) for the last time, the picking (of rosiness) up to now is to be taken out to the counter of Pomona, the Goddess of fruits and fruit trees, the wife of Vertumnus. Constancy: an experienced, well prepared lye, mildly carried away by the breaking into brisk dwelling - it spreads everywhere drop by drop, moistens the eye glasses, scratches the lungs, eavesdrops the squanderingly modulated thunder at the crucial moment of distancing from the remaining principles, raises up for the head and comes down for the horizon of always the same indolence of a being.

* * *

07/16-19/96

(The Second Apartment). In this, second apartment (the first one is, for now, unusable - flooded as much with the rain as with dubiousness, the water flower of taciturnity, the muteness of plaster), besides similar, reflected geometry (all which was on one side there, is on the other here, and all which was piled in one corner there, here is crouched in another), there also exists similarity in principle: both this and the other apartment wait for the new tenant as something long ago predicted and approved by a wide spread fixity, with an appropriate sense of understanding, a conspiracy of the three Greek and Roman Fates (Parcae), who controlled human destiny (Clotho, the one who spun the thread of life, Lachesis, the arbiter of its length, and Antropos, the one who cuts it), and their Nordic equivalent - Norns, the three Fates representing the Past, the Present, and the Future. It doesn’t reveal itself by changing the rhythm when it is stepped into, it even readily offers itself in the form of a warm cube, ritually expressed disguise of Omphale, a Queen of Lydia whom Hercules served for three years as a slave, spinning among her women and dressed in women’s clothes (while Omphale kept his club and his lion’s skin). Considerately, it (the apartment) dissolves into constituent parts, into which there would divide any other abode in its place, sentimentally sinking into a cleft between the functional indifference of stylishly paled upholstery and the trained leak of the kitchen faucet. Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo. Fall from the wall: a sudden playfulness of the previous tenant’s monologue falls down (furor loquendi is that which, after someone’s residing, for at least a day or two remains) - there grows light-mindedness of the old promise prior to the new move of a person directed into continuation. Only the, so-called, outside sounds reach him from the new corners - to get rid of them and he will be able to pretend knowing both the rind (the yard) and the kernel (the dwelling). One voice, thus, keeps on hanging around the top of the list of rational phenomena: the alt of Parizade, the heroine of a story in the "Arabian Nights" (Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan), a daughter of the sultan of Persia, by the machination of her two aunts brought up in ignorance of her birth, but she later became known to her father as his daughter by succeeding in obtaining help from the talking bird, the singing tree, and the yellow water - then it, itself, gently disperses, like a conclusion from the aesthetically completed dream; another sound comes from a bigger depth (somewhere around the temple) - from there it leans toward a simplified explanation of the meta-purpose but returns in a haste, climbs upon the embittered remainder, rings to cause alarm anticipating that this is to do with leaving this apartment as well, and moving into the next one. (Decies repetita placebit). Such composed finale of the sojourn (the sudden end of the lodging which only started), the newly arrived lodger recognizes as the phenomenon which brought him to all of this, having laid down on his back thinking about something which cannot be interpreted poorly: Das Beste ist gut genug.

* * *

(A Frame of Mind). Fairly complex, often gifted machines/animals: that is, approximately, the backbone theme of the contemporary, technological-philosophical thinking about the composition of humans. [Exposed to the green-white-murky fermentation of a modern rural house in the aristocratic shadow of the tall trees in the woods of N. Waterford, Maine, appropriately stretched with tasteful indescribability of patient vanity, the contemporary philosopher (D.C.Dennett) proposes a basis for such an indecency, proclaiming with an easiness the official foundation of his (the thinker’s) estimate of large things while from him, carefully relaxed on the bluish arm-chair in a living room of beige colour, one after the other nicely and fluently arranged words turn around to determine which direction to take today. Satiety by ego or one’s own panic, skillfully hidden until this moment?]. On the other side, the traditional (clerical/religious) teachings also persist, dealing with the soul as if it didn’t betray them first, spoiled having run away to a safe shelter of such a fine texture - the suspicion. In both attitudes (frames of mind), (falsely irreconcilable like two, presumptively at odds, salesmen of the same nothingness) to the same height it is raised and bleats the inexcusable pervasion with one’s own time, more exactly - a moment. As if during this, laughably short time, there carried out the entire expression of everything which exists and as if with that (having waited for the present interpreters only) the unwanted and unwarrantable doubt should be revoked, by the act of proclaiming any of these theories as valid. {The viruses originated some 5 billion years ago (it is possible that they sprung up later, from more complex organisms, by loosing the functions of the latter - something similar to the disintegration of countries), bacteria showed 4 billion years ago, single-cell algae 3, protozoa 1, amphibians 250 million years ago, reptiles 130 (they’re not from yesterday either), mammals 70 million years ago, finally - Homo erectus followed by Homo habilis showed about 10 million years ago, and from them the Wise Man - Homo sapiens. Indeed, the genetic information, with the addition of that in the brain (starting from amphibians), increased from 30,000 bits in viruses to 10 trillion bits in man, excluding the asomatous, cultural information (libraries, etc.). Still, and besides the impressiveness of the last figure, human life is short relative to the mentioned pretentiousness of that (one) sample of everything that exists [and that which (being thought of as if it) does not exist] - in most cases one deals with about seventy years; with a collective inheritance this can be pushed to those few (out of thousands of) millions of years, not more}. At first sight, the sharp line of the boundary between, conditionally speaking, "traditionalists" and "modernists", since the dawn of time, is only one more spice to the turning of all these days (and nights) over our heads. But, if it was not for those schools of thought (belief), there would be others - after all, some attitude is inevitable. However, the only one acceptable is the one which commands that, having suddenly opened our eyes in the primary marvel, the easy conclusion should be rejected along with that which, stretching before the barrel of the hunter hunting himself, hesitates between the exultancy and despair until, having come to itself, it starts getting ready (the licence of one’s own unutterability) for the zeroth abundance from which, without a special reason and justification, it faultlessly bridles up, and conciliatory and forever now returns to it. Fata viam invenient.

* * *

(The First Apartment). I’m back, in the first apartment. (Here, otherwise the same, the birds are definitely louder. Advantage or disadvantage? In the other apartment, the walls of the building are set such to disperse any flock still in conception. Crux criticorum - the puzzle of critics?). Having returned back, I find the unconcernedness and habit at each step - the same ingratitude blossoms in that corner there. (Return to foresight as to the desirable flow of things). Rolled through the expired year into a hyperbolic flour of erosion of nullity through nothing, this habitation (of mine) results from infallibleness of a constant: at one moment it is characterized by the assiduousness of Sandalphon, one of three angels who receive the prayers of the faithful and weave them into crowns, at the other moment by the melodramatics of the Seven Sleepers, seven Christian youths of Ephesus, who took refuge from persecution in a cave, where they walled up, but were miraculously made to sleep for two or three hundred years. To be in a residence, to dwell in a hyperborean state (its logical centre): to sprout forth in a region of everlasting sunshine and spring, in the absorbency of the world beyond the ceiling, windows and door - the parts leaned against a certain, constantly calculated shield. (Not even the lawfulness of this residence can count on an immovability larger than a practical one - these bricks, too, will dissolve before the leaving tenant: bon voyage!). A very nice morning, promising like one of Harmonies in propositions of the Seven Wise Men of Greece (Bias, Chilo, Cleobulus, Periander, Pittacus, Solon, and Thales), already warms the right window of prejudice (letting the left breaking into the ruthless shadow). Gaining in power, it (the morning) moves up warming itself with the false projection of Trinity, reduced to three Sirens (Parthenope, Ligea, Leucosia). Having fallen at this soul-stirring instant of a possible beauty into the trap between the walls, floor and well-proportioned) silence, this morning, too, shakes off, enlarges last week’s crack (a cut of comfortable shiver of Momus, the God of laughter and ridicule) over the exemplary tenant, the example of atypical faithfulness to a particular cell of the sense, the domicile as the temporariness of a journey, compagnon de voyage.

* * *

The words of explanation are all the more far from the truth of Midgard, the abode of human beings, or the earth. (Even a missed chance to establish regularity from disorder, sinks by pouring into Lethe, one of the rivers of the infernal regions, which causes those who drink its water to lose all recollection of their past experience). The green profusion of trees (at the apex of ramification as at the end of ambuscade) bursts through the modesty aware of the dramatized advantage: an opportunity like this will not come soon again - green is anticipated, it is seldom that, as this morning, it uncovers itself without shame (of Melpomene, the Muse who presided over tragedy). A younger man (Dmitri Karamazov) and woman (Грушенка), walk towards the bus stop. (They leave on a trip, while it still means something to them). (In such, favourable conditions, leaving even for Mildendo, the capital of Lilliput in Swift’s "Gulliver’s Travels", or for Gopher Prairie, a fictitious town in Minnesota, the scene of Sinclair Lewis’ novel "Main Street", typical of a hidebound small town of petty character, is equal to travelling to the all-seeing state of Fata Morgana, a celebrated fairy in medieval poems of Italy; a mirage sometimes seen at the Strait of Messina). Properly set up, the fire hydrant provides an additional assurance, the bigger things have been insured a long time ago, in case of a disatisfaction outbreak both the police and military have predetermined roles and check points. An older man (Dmitri’s father, the old Karamazov), in a blue shirt and short pants, delivers local newspaper, puts it in front of the immobile apartments. [In the paper, the generalized void is bored of repeating itself (by a leap over the head) but he, of endurable although indistinct figure, long ago distanced himself from the content - sentimental towards the form, he fullfills its unpretending wish: he delivers a trivial solution]. And all that is seen, felt, heard as it presses, escavates, bids farewell at my left side (through that window), towards which, lightly bent, leaned with a sense of measure, I decide to let my thoughts go today too, until at the last and (sic!) saving moment (an instant of surgical incision upon the hug of uniformity), the morning topples down into the proof of details, and I dress up getting ready to, although still biassed toward a hunter-like lurked and goose-like disguised fullness, go to work at the regular time 7:30 am, thus increasing it, l’affaire s’achemine.

* * *

07/20-21-21-II/96

(Olympic Games - 2). Similarly to establishing lawfullness in the form of an incident: both the previous (1) and these (2) Olympic Games find me alone in a room, in the times past - in dubious, but, by now - in identified places (Wat., Sch’dy). That which was, at the time, written about the previous games, I could copy to describe the current ones - both were carefully organized. En suite. By their nature, Olympic Games are a noble intention, an opportunity for greater understanding between people and races. However, that, theoretical motivation, and partially achieved practical result, as with other things, is only one side of the medal. On the other side there fortifies itself the contemporary (imperialistic) pretentiousness of the larger and stronger countries, still further emphasized by their sudden (artificial), cheered up attention (even if not bigger than that in a curious but spoiled child, enfant gâté) towards, until then, systematically ignored small and smaller countries in partibus infidelium, often even being bombed and/or otherwise punished with the, so-called, sanctions (an euphemism derived from the trade war) because of their political disobedience. Culpam poena premit comes. Of course, this is nothing new either, after all some always rule over the others, but that doesn’t mean that such a state of affairs shouldn’t be brought into the question and, whenever, crushed by resistance and struggle so that, once, one rules oneself. [Never defy a fool (only) - Il ne faut jamais défier un fou]. But, this writing is not about that [although it is a reflection, not of a suspicion into sincerety (good intentions) of modern empires (that would be as much derivable stupid as underivable soft), but of the coming to know the type of illness] - it is only an opportune/engaging introduction to three other observations. With the exemption of the smoke, show, and noise of Rome (fumum et opes, strepitumque Romae), predictable and, in the sense of an elementary fascination by the state organized spectacle, necessary ceremonious pomp of last night’s opening of the Olympic Games in Atlanta [at the 100^th anniversary of their modern renewal, at which occasion I, too, got interested having pulled out for a long time not used, described TV set and, lacking an antennae, having connected instead a large gage wire, more exactly a metal rope used for tying up the couch to prevent it from unfolding during moving from one, confirmed doubt, to another, still in diapers], the gala beginning itself and its, as it is said in the techno-urban style, accompanying elements, were glaring with another, triple abundance: of smileful faces of athletes from those smaller countries (and larger, of course), of freshly made states, and of police and military. Having started from the end of the list (going in the opposite direction), the newspapers say that there are some 20,000 of them (the troops) inside and out of the Olympic Village. Custus morum? As the years go by and the Games are coming up again, the presence of the military and police increases, so much so that the claim that all this is still a comfortable happening and entertainment for civilians becomes all the more absurd and grotesque. The so-called security and safety, which are being maintained such that during every four years, between the Olympiads, some countries are being burnt and scorched in the course of establishing (the newest) order in the world so that, every fourth summer, tanks are almost brought up in front of stadiums to make sure that, during the pause after the main theme, all play a bit, all the more and increasingly awkwardly show their real face - degeneracy and coerciveness. What is the difference between amassing the police and military at a city square for the purposes of breaking off demonstrations against (any) régime, and setting the same or a larger number of the same troops around and inside the sport facilities during, the assumption is, peaceful athletic competitions? Doesn’t this distance, all the more irreversibly, the Games from games and the world from the (even if once in four years) illusory representation of itself? As with regards to the hyperinflation of the upstart states (not the lands, though, that goes harder), resulted mainly from the devastating downfall of Eastern Europe, it was visible, at least by their sport representatives, besides their undoubted cockiness also their immature and vain expectation that they were representing something better and more than when they were coming from the constituent parts of, at earlier times, more significant and larger enitities. {In the eyes of the big ones who, gloating, in essence laugh at them, as well as in their own eyes, at rare but visible moments suddenly (momentarily) foggy due to the crushing uncertainty [fuimus Troes - we were once Trojans (but Troy has been overthrown)], such state of the things showed itself right away and in its full obviousness. Such a crussade, and so miserable a result}. But, their by now funny number and, certainly full of complexes, second-rate rating (including of the larger parts, from which there separated the smaller ones) are only another testament to the eternal human stupidity and indecisiveness, the acceptance of defeat and living with it. {Fuit Ilium - Troy has been (but is now no more)]. Finally, and perhaps the deepest implanted in human nature, although it has less and less reasons for that (if it ever had), was the grinning as a result of the new occasion and situation, place and happening, the oblivion for anything else at that moment (of those, that is, who knew something else as well). Not all, but a good number of the participants from the small and smallest teams joined the expected (anticipated) delight of the bigger and biggest ones. Imitatores, servum pecus. As if, at that hour, all of them thought of something nice. Maybe they did, and their justification might be in that, but for a foundation of such a hope it is needed much more than a naive faith and oblivion of a moment. A posse ad esse. With the exemption of the described ones, every other state and competition, in both these and other games, is more human and acceptable. Of course, the described states and competitions are human too, but unacceptable.

* * *

Only a month passed since the summer solstice (the longest day of a blissful sameness), and the shadows are already noticably longer. (At that, they are also more serious, deeper - making the unwariness heavy, flowing away in return for fullness, victory on its knees - à genoux. [The death of a writer - and yet he thought that he had mastered the language. Dilapidation of words does not discriminate among its victims - it replaces everyone equally)]. They (the shadows) do not give up so easily anymore, they hold on to a doubleness of position (alter ego), like a raised snake and something milder, a shaken observer. (For him, late summer is an excuse for the patience of a dog). While he observes - his shadow lengthens, when his look is rested, he packs up and leaves. After him it (the shadow) does the same too, masterfully finished (like the score of Nemesis, the Goddess of retributive justice - the just vengeance). (In addition to all of this so far, he is now responsible for the length and quality of the shadow). And that exactly is what is happening to him: all the slower departure, all the longer observation (into all the shorter days one has to penetrate without remainder). He doesn’t leave before making sure that he completed his work in a satisfactory way (having removed gold plating from the main of Nemean lion, killed by Hercules in the course of his twelve labors). Since in longer, more sunny days, less of something got hidden, it takes him (the observer) less time to examine and learn (all of that): he (then) tightens up quicker, pulls with him (in the same clew) the shadow, too. And, as the days get shorter, his work becomes longer and more complicated - until he checks all of that out, averages it, brings it into a connection, ransacks the cause (shakes out the effect), serves the form (betrays the pith), fixes the hat (messes up the hair), kindly shakes hands with impertinence. He (then) retreats into himself in the late morning as in the ahead known interpretation of Neogaia, the Neotropical area of the earth, considered as the one of the primary realms. (There, even when boiling, everything cleans coldly, like a laser gun with the mirror of a target). In conspiracy with the theory of Nox, the Goddess of night, along with the loyal shadow of Nyx, her derivative, persistently and hazardously he shines, melted by the dawn copper, hardened by the afternoon’s blue, shaded by the evening’s learning (emerald + nickel = acceleration of radiance), he behaves as if the experiment with one, in essence turquoise basis of the world, is performed only now and here, as if it has not, before all of this, happened in a cover as a relief of the things (in the past glow of the toast, the possesion for all times - ktema es aei), the rule according to which even the last justification for the impudent sewn in the increasingly deeper evening gentlemanly shuts down.

* * *

(The Angel and the Trade Master). Preoccupied with the repair of the world, the trade master spends himself more than an angel. (An avenger of injury - vindex injuriæ). While the master (since the early morning) trims, hammers, sings and knocks all of that down (to the back trench of the deserted front), the angel paints himself with the untouchable, piously charming, appropriate colour for this day too. One is preparing for the clash (the master of trade), the other (angel) is subjecting to the Sunday forgiveness (to the Mass after which one breathes yet more easily); while the first one thinks of how to raise the ladder to the reason, the other offers himself as the complete solution (the adornment of Zanoni, the hero of a novel by the same name by Bulwer - Lytton, a man who could communicate with spirits, and produce gold and gems). The angel flirts with desirableness, the master wrestles with doubt. While the master is achieving hollow victory, the angel decorates himself with decoration forged in the shop of Zephon, a cherub in Milton’s professionally planned delusion of "Paradise Lost", sent with Ithuriel to unmask Satan in Eden. Having placed, at a critical moment, the striking blow to the angel by the question without an answer - (practically) having won the battle (having brought the angel to the edge of defeat), the master (full of disdain towards such an inexpressive and, with that, unworthy adversary), finally (inevitably) clashes with himself, puts away the hammer (a cube-shaped contrition of the strike) under the feet of the solitude but falls into a skillfully arranged dream, in which there smiles at him in a seraphic way the cordial world of a just solution in the form of the flying island Laputa (raised above the earth by means of a huge lodestone, and visited by Gulliver), inhabited by persons-philosophers so deeply immersed in their most abstruse studies as to be quite oblivious of everything else, and therefore having attendants called ‘flappers’, whose duty was to rouse their learned bosses attention by striking them with a blown bladder attached to a handle - such a practical tool. (Übung macht den Meister). Due to the unreal content of the dream, the master, however, wakes up from there too and, having thought over what to do without having it wrongly understood, he descends into the exploration shaft of his own mending so as if he could become a role model himself, but without the flappers and angelic wings.

* * *

07/22-24/96

(Form and Essence). Changing the shape of the letters (font) in the word processor, one, of course, does not change their substance, but exactly on that, on claiming such a change, there insists the modern reductionis. Obsessed with form rather than essence, with semantics rather than meaning, it brings nonexistent value into a loose declaration. Refusing here to deal with the masquerade of catch-words/phrases of the business community (jumping to a level up), the terms such as "artificial intelligence" or "artificial neural network", with the subsets "expert systems", "knowledge systems", followed by the "smart" and "intelligent" composites/components/devices, as well as other objects of the kind, are a reflection of poor expressiveness, in combination with the exaggerated and by so much inexact statements about the essence of the subjects which they treat, rather than they are a corresponding description and reliable document. Reducing the notions in question to the mere functionality of a suitable usage (as in the cited cases) or, simply, attributing names to the concepts which do not deserve them (because they don’t fit them), is a portrayal and the portrayer of every excessive (immoderate) and, after all, funny triumph over a (much more) moderate result. Mixing the form and essence is a special case of the mentioned, generalized effort to place a significantly) smaller value under some glorious and relatively impressive name (or under the high quality of paper and printing). One of the concrete examples of disharmony and confusion between the form and essence is, therefore, piles of variously coloured magazines and books (the newspapers are here only the everyday’s climax) which, besides such their faultless, and by so much more absurd graphical equipping, in the majority of cases have little, and often none of some (substantial) value. The entire (such) straddle between that for which it is claimed that it is something, and its true meaning and worthiness, is only an instantaneous phase of an otherwise everlasting struggle between pretensions and achievements. Volo, non valeo. And, as it usually happens, the generators of such deformed/inadequate states (confusions) are generously being cloned (copied) by the humble army of followers (veluti in speculum), on almost all sides of the world, everyone multiplying his own deficiency of expression and healing the lackey’s weakness through the ceremonial discordancy between Faunus and Pharisee. (The head of a fool never becomes white - Tête de fou ne blanchit jamais).

* * *

(Certainty). Such persistence of the day-after-day advancement only a stubborn theory can explain. A certainty without rivalry, amphora full of tomorrow. (A photograph multiplied on the basis of cyanin, C₂₉H₃₅N₂I, in Göethe’s treatment of the infinite picture of Dr. Johann Faust, an astrologer and magician who sold his soul to the devil (Mephistopheles) in return for youth, knowledge, and the pleasure to say Dios me libre de hombre de un libro). Long ago they (the days) agreed about all this (the obligation of Harlequin, according to them) - such a (colossal) certainty was not seen even by Lynceus, one of the Argonauts, famed for his extraordinary sharpness of sight. That the time on Earth propagates ahead and in the Heavens backward is a question of honour: who is going to move out of whose way first (the unpleasant bareness promoted to the chast spite of Libitina, a Goddess presiding over deaths and funerals), although it also testifies about something independent, almost very exciting, if it was not for the uniformity of the solution (the day doesn’t honestly break yet, and the kill is already full of it - that same silence from yesterday and in it Eris, a Goddess of strife or discord, and Erlking, an evil elf or goblin of German folklore, harmful especially to children). A solo healing agent of Daphne (a nymph pursued by Apollo, whom she escaped by being changed into a laurel), full of the moments of weakness. The unbreakable state of contempt towards circumstances. To it (the unbreakable state), they (the circumstances) represent no more than a naked boredom, en déshabillé. The certainty of tomorrow shading the recollection of yesterday: the melassic disorder of which there remained nothing, maybe only patience, the contemporary replacement for liberation.

* * *

(The Farce). A fat woman waits for a car to pick her up. Then, she gets in it, angrily takes the driver’s seat, he humbly moves to the seat next to the driver’s. (Mutuus consensus). This is going on for several days already (early in the morning), but not every day. (As if she is going to beat up the one who comes to pick her up. He is probably late, with his mouth open and eyes spread coming from "Voyages" by Hakluyt, across Caora, a river near which dwelled people who were said to have their eyes in their shoulders and their mouths in the middle of their breasts). A completely absurd situation: the chubby woman wears a yellow wind breaker and white shorts. [No clumsiness prevents her to wear something which doesn’t suit her, to get a hold (like a unicorn) of the constellation of Monoceros]. The very existence of something like that, insignificant (without influence to anything of an importance), so much trifling that it too, possibly, at moments of crisis starts pondering about itself - speaks about certain complexity of this, at the first look trivial happening, equal to the metamorphosis of Callisto, an Arcadian nymph who, before she climbed to Ursa Major, changed into a bear. Both the event (by itself) and its participants {the fleshy, clearly visible woman, the man who practically is not seen, the functional car of incomprehensible colour, the fixity of the morning as the perseverance of likelihood (the banality spread prostrated, maximus in minimis), and a little joy [having passed through a crack in someone’s soul, a wasp intoxicated by the proximity of death (by climbing on it by subsequent buzzing, mors omnibus communis)]} - all that which suddenly created itself, hardened in this (brutally broken) moment [the car arrived, there took place the outburst of her anger, she furiously slammed the door, turned around and waddled away like a bear (into immeasurableness, the lair of a day), surprised by the eagle-eyed irrevocableness of the deficiency the man once or twice blew the horn (briefly hit the steering wheel) and (carefully) disappeared himself, covered by the concluding inexplicableness (the nest on the crown of the bygone inexplicability), the ultimate fracture of until this moment possible but (it turned out) unrealistic tranquility], it happened, therefore, so that something would go on, no matter what and regardless of who, how and why participates in it (par manière d’acquit), without significance of a shade/aroma in giving up to the faultless fuzziness of a principle of larger complexity, the sweetness of the farce as the charming lack of signification, the cosmic choke by the self.

* * *

07/25-29/96

(The Third Apartment). Through the left window - overwhelmed with autonomy there stays a pole, in the right - a mild descent of relief. (In one - antique foothold of the solid appearance, the other one adroitly offers itself as a geographic escape). [Whether (and when) will the unbribable time steal out from here too, depends on the strength of the walls of this, third river bed for the flow of the same things]. The oxidation of a shrewdness in the air (the rust of a moment in thought). (Corrigenda - things to be bettered, an already mentioned list of imperfections). A tree leaned against the building across the street: the nearness of the two, essentially the same Stoicisms of Janus, a deity represented with two faces looking in opposite directions, and whose temple was closed in time of peace, but open during war. Up and down the street, there drive their cars experienced strangers, the experts of the routine - there waits for them an embelished encounter, an intonation of a sagacious person, they hope while rejoicing under the watchful eye of Hela, the Goddess of the dead, half blue and half of fair complexion. There comes the bus (arrival/departure), as empty as wages for the fear of Hercules, one of whose labors was to fetch apples for the three nymphs Hesperides, from the golden tree watched by a dragon. A calm after the newest move: the closed ajar door to the hell of paradise, a carton box containing the writing/graphics set of Demogorgon, a mysterious evil divinity, holding a powerful sway in the unseen world, the treasure island as a luxuriant leap into the prophecy of Epimenides (a sage and prophet who slept in a cave for fifty-seven years, and on awaking found himself possessed of prodigious wisdom), the complement of previous habitation in completeness of its description, a subject (dweller) and object (dwelling) under the right angle between the ceiling, wall and assuredness of a being, for the third time in less than a year.

* * *

(Genealogy). A tree like a fall: overflowing downwards it extinguishes the fire of Cocytus, a river of the infernal regions. (It resembles a willow tree but it is more agile, ready for the condition of Damocles, a courtier, envious of pomp and power, whom Dionysius, ruler of Syracuse, treated to a splendid feast, but over whose head a naked sword was suspended by a hair, as a lesson that danger may overhang greatness and outward felicity). Another tree (down the street) takes care of a modest home of a laborious black man - patronizingly enlarged, it is thrown over the proper roof (with a few irregularities, which would welcome repair) as if it has a long and important talk with him. (Perhaphs he, the house owner, signed a contract with it, the maple tree, according to which it, in the rain and under the sun, is to straighten its back like a last defense, and he, in return, will carry it in his thoughts even though they, because of that, could still become heavier. Motu proprio). The described trees (across the street) blend into a lesser primeval forest (into a weakness of green, the snow storm of leaves), into the report of the Ministry of Reason about the parks full of the absent-minded walkers, left to themselves as if Pandora, the wife of Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus, a woman sent by the Gods to bring evil upon men as a punishment of the theft of fire by Prometheus, having opened a box of blessings whereupon all escaped except Hope, took it too. (According to another version, instead of the blessings the box contained all the ills of mankind, which were released throughout the world - an equivalent to the first story in which Pandora takes away the Hope as well). (Expressiveness - a symbolic virtue as a full price of loneliness). Genealogy: possible progenitors of both trees drowned in the layers of chlorophyll like an observer in breathing postponed until tomorrow; both he and they - shoots of a larger, genealogical tree, first branched out, then pulled in, each to its root. À l’abri.

* * *

While it lasts, the summer descends down the street of the previous ones in spite of having, like them (long ago burnt summers), such unique opinion of itself. (A dance performed by one person - pas seul). At moments it becomes obstinate and starts to pour down (a warm avalanche of spoiled storm), at other times it immovably hangs from the center of the sky for hours (it makes the beach red-hot, justifies the bathers), pas à pas on va bien loin. It melts like in past years (limited outside, limitless inside), grows ripe (abandons the unruliness of Thaïs, an Athenian courtesan, the heroine of a novel by Anatole France and an opera by Jules Massenet, in which she is reformed by a monk), satisfies the classical screenplay. If it becomes self-absorbed - it is listed as quasi-philosophical (le monde savant), by letting itself to fashionableness - it is registered as light-minded (le roi est mort, vive le roi!). It hardly reached its half and yet it (the summer) testifies about something larger, whole: something which, so stereotypic (by means of a picture about the desired temperature of hell), stretched above the trapeze of paradise, as if it is its imperceptible (unobtrusive) adviser, and not its boss. At times, something (the hand of periodicity) leads it into a shower, at other times it hammers it to a yellow as to a burnt away effect - it portrays childhood knowing that the first impression is the most important, that the copper-plated days and silver-plated nights, as a rule, become more valuable to cold-sensitive beings, the wise persons of shallowness of Freya (Frigga), the Goddess of love and youth: possunt quia posse videntur.

* * *

07/30-31/08/01/96

(The Indescribability of Magnolia). All that lasts so cold (the undescribable state of Magnolia), presents itself in the way of a boiling enterprise (rebellion) until it, too, in the evening, disappears behind the well framed window of the house across the street, in the wall of violet colour. (It is not permitted to know all things - Nec scire fas est omnia). Since early morning it prepares for the emperor-like spring - it renews itself in such a way as to stay immobile, not touching the houses (nor cars) at the places at which, last night, they again felt what, even a short-lasting, forgetfulness means [during the time during which their owners, having fallen asleep, were dreaming something else (immaterial?), or, before the dawn, turning on the other side (into négligé)]. It relies on the news about the striking blow of local strikers (without hesitation toward the imprudent move) - it hunts from the change of a melody as from the stillness of Meleager (a slayer of the formidable Calydonian boar and lover of Atalanta, a hero whose life depended on how long a fire-brand remained unconsumed), from which there emerge unnecessary vehicles, and in them not vindictive, still sleepy people. It puts the crust of the fixity on the second (spare) face, with the first one being absorbed into the world of Phoebus (an appellation of Apollo, especially in his quality of Son-God), pleased with the conventional vivacity - it prescribes its heterodoxy for today, in line with the unwritten rule about equalizing delusion with the, so-called, independent production, as if everything is not connected, dependent and, by that, intelligible. It directs itself towards a small, transitory wonder - the calculatory pose of the official participants of the hour of purification in the state cathedral of St. Paul. The thing which remains: to explain to the confused (a wrongly mobilized) salvation army the advantages of a motionless war against the Magnolia of haughty indescribability, the result of the gardening across the street as its weaponry. (Non nostrum est tantas componere lites).

* * *

(The Ultimate Sum of July). Just one more day and this month has completed its chore. [Its extorted gilding (almost sparklingness, if it didn’t extinguish itself each time with a mashy shower), even its provocative shade of uprising (so uncharacteristic of summer months and, because of that, deadened by laziness or impassiveness) - what else would it have to offer without falling into a state of reconcilableness, rusticalness, the idealized description of collaboration?].

While it doubtlessly switches off (its suspiciousness reduces its merit, alacrity falls into water, unwariness offends it but experience calms it: the change with the remaining excuse of the summer, August, is, after all, logical), it perfects into the sanativeness of golf (shines with a miniaturized tumble), cleanses from the sentimentality of a hit, ties up into a tail and paraphrases with curative plaster of Jagannāth (Juggernaut), lord of the earth and incarnation of God Vishnu, who so excited his worshipers when it was hauled along on a large car during religious rites that they threw themselves under the wheels and were crushed. In solo Deo salus.

A state of proclamation (an official stand) during this, last day of the month, reads as before: all that happened in previous days (started rolling, foaming and then declined) completes the pamphlet out of which, in a paragon manner, the only possible outcome announces itself the whole afternoon, through a certain kind of example, the pathetic indiscretion of Jamshyd, a Persian King who originally lived in the heavens where he boasted that he was immortal so he was ordered to go to live as a human being on earth, truth to say at the rank of a king. Laudum immensa cupido.

With such a result (now, it’s clearly visible) only an excessive loyalty didn’t count: once started, the process of small disappointments sticks at nothing before the complete treachery of, until then, a comfortable month, full of the white (Officinale), yellow (Gelsemium), and red (Ipomoea) jasmine, but also of bitter destiny, as it is generally stated, of such a shorthand of flower at the moment of facing, according to the calendar, the last day of the onomatopoeia of summer - the measurableness of the well warmed multitude as the ultimate sum of July.

* * *

(A Moment of Weakness). And so, as it has been foreseen: yesterday - July, today - August. A che vuole, non mancano modi. (A double name of something longer lasting and stronger, an element of heat - a kind of a watery flower, decoration of the observer of improvement, fittingly disguised as a water lilly). The change of one by the other (the fermentation of the same) doesn’t leave anyone at peace: pretendedly, it keeps him (in the domain of limpidity) with its impresiveness and irrevocability, it does not allow for doubt (it doesn’t give an impetus to suspicion - a seductive obscureness of the central scene) - and everything happens literally over night, à la dérobée. {Baraka [The Essence of Everything (as translated from the dead language)], by Ron Fricke, a film as a standstill of an eye, speed equalizing with the self}. The voluntary move of one agreed to retreat (with which he only disturbs the picture of himself, anno aetatis suae), a descent and an ascent upon this day or another (under the assumption that they’re not the same) - well thought of and skillfully arranged epigrams before our eyes, a proven success of simple infatuation (not even the bus, just passed down the street slanted to leak into a heroic song, stopped because, at the symbolic stop full of heroes, there was nobody again).

A harmony of epic disharmony (disharmony of lyric harmony), a main role in reenacted revulsion of Iāson, the Healer, a Prince who led the Argonauts and, with the help of his wife Medea, got the Golden Fleece in spite of the fire-breathing bulls and the dragon guarding it: too passionate in their roles, the people-actors organize a little dance (a bisogni si conoscono gli amici - a friend in need is a friend indeed), vivaciously acclaiming to the strength, in the moment of weakness.

* * *

08/02-04/96

(A Hermetic State). The majority of these writings is hermetical on purpose: to petrify (to turn into stone) as much perfection as possible and, when there comes the melting, to tilt such obtained pleasantness (extrait, the well bred knighthood of monolith) so that it, like an ordinary (everyday’s) conversation, listlessly flows down the palm. Other things, at the moment of dramatic confusion, settle into an artifact of reminiscence anyway: the pictures, records, tapes, that kind of stuff - all which contain proof of prudence of the surrounding, growth and, after all, (rigid) solitariness (a difficulty worthy of powerful intervention - dignus vindice nodus).

A caryatid of straightness of the past, thriftless moment: as if it is to do with a matter more precious than the standard, more profane one, as if it is about some other, unintelligible and not mechanical records of a (supposed) spirit, the document of someone’s characteristic (it is also believed - a not repeatable) appearance/attitude, as if all that (ex vi termini) is not laying down in prosaic circumstances and simple substance, in disharmony between the official ("subtle") construction of the sound/picture and, according to the other convention, the "ordinary", molecular structure of that which so faithfully and (exactly because of that) indifferently carries them (both the sound and picture). In ovo, ex tacito. The paper/emulsion of the (muted on time) pictures, the magnetic particles of the tapes, the relief (granulation) of the phonograph records, and the photonic grid of the newest, optical disks (CDs) - they are all the center of a brilliant (supernatural) transformation (if one is to believe that), or of the only essence (which seems to be closer to a rational conclusion) of that which (Oh, the redundant foginess!) so readily (in superficiality of the haste) we classify under the immaterial and immeasurable. (Accomplished labors are pleasant - jucundi acti labores). The self-deceit resulting from a conceited conflict with eternity, motivated by the secrecy and hermetic state of the "ordinary" matter. For, it is a fact that the cited, material form/structure directly contains (however thought of it as being inaccessible, in limine) the "spiritual" information, untroubled cerebration of Iphigenia, the subject of tragedies by Euripides and Göethe and opera by Gluck, a daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, who was about to be sacrificed to avert the wrath of Artemis, when, at the last moment, he himself saved her life making her a priestess.

A smile, melancholy, or (simply) captured nobleness of expression in a picture; also an aria, march, or voice which, at a fatal moment, pulls out from a gramophone record (freeing itself from it), or anything so "spiritual" (at least - enthusiastic), but, in fact, reduced to a customary (without a higher involvement), that is, mechanically fitted structure [although, amidst the amorphous basis of the confrontation of notorious voluptuary (the God of forests, Pan, or rural deity, faun) with the remnants of the afternoon’s sense]: they all testify about the foolish obsession with the mysterious projection of the world, but also about certain inflexibility, a hermetic state of the photograph, record, intervening medium which, besides the required and demonstrated strictness of articulation, does not succeed in explaining the incongruity, lack of concordance between conception and essence, impermeableness and mercilessness of representation, in pleno.

* * *

(Necessity and Sufficiency or A Japanese Cherry-Tree). For a heartless analysis of things, a corner of an empty room is sufficient. It is even desirable, in fact necessary: in it nothing resembling smooth whiteness (decisive sharpness) of vertiginous thread of a fertile (ready for anything) spider, can hide - it does not have anywhere to. (Horae canonicae). There, everything is as in a palm: no personal mask, state propaganda, clerical moral of the story or partial solution in such a flat tweaking of the pannels, iguanian crossing of axes (Iguana tuberculata), have anything to look for. One need not go anywhere (except for advice of Epigoni, the heroes who avenged their fathers, all seven of them, and conquered Thebes), nor should one sniff anything out (except the sky punctured by swaying of Dryope, a nymph changed into a poplar), nor give one’s consent to anything (except to the frivolousness of Igorrote, the Malayan tribes of head-hunters, living in Luzon), nor should one dream (except the August demolition of an igloo, a dome-shaped hut built of snow); instead - one ought to contrive (by uniformity of culmination) the abundance of the tenant’s gentlemanliness in a lone man’s instict. Also, the so-called classical writers (the intention of this hoarse text is not to list them) found out everything without departing their room (a sort of head). Of course, both then and now, another time is more visible [then - thoughtless, now - tourist (triumphant), in a word: safari] - the time of desultory conversations and the same observations and lores (a nominally accepted antipode to such a characterization is the excessive/exhausting specialization, something which in a narcissistic way attributes exclusiveness to itself, pretentiously separating from that larger, more wholly and collected principle of the inconceivableness of a pebble), this is, therefore, a time of established and explained roads, purchases and sell-outs (of entire countries, together with pride) and of none (non-technological) results except all the more vacuous, empty talk. As the basic pondering is best conducted in a pernicious solitariness, the former is the only justification of the latter. If it wasn’t for that, the cruelty of the loneliness would be exposed to an enraged reaction of inhabitants in their cells (the real results of their dwellings). [In contrast to them, whom even the President addresses (sic!), to those in prisons the explanation of the world comes from the Warden: unlike the first ones, they do not move their personal (proprietary) catharsis every half an hour from room to kitchen, the sentimental thought of inevitable fault is being projected by the prison management there where they (the prisoners) expect it - into the passableness of a cell as a correctional facility of sense]. (The sufficiency of a faultless reflection = the necessity of a simple surrounding; a sudden forethought: to look through the window - mádò kara sótò wo mírù). Staying (in thoughts) under the flowery tree across the street (joining the imagined guests in a sentence/phrase: ‘Kárèra wa niwá ni imasù - They’re outside, in the garden’), looking, therefore, through the window at a Japanese cherry-tree sakúranbō in the yard of a tactical (periodic) acceptance of beauty as the universal state of a flower gravidated by a slanted lightness, one realizes the refinement of the tree first: falling off all the time, until a moment ago the impervious white collapses into a local imitation of the Orient, as if the promise of constancy and pointing out the right way from the Far East Conceit are not themselves (unbearable flattened) thrown through this window to the other side of the street, increasingly distancing from the ideal state of the light cherry-tree, fitting inattentively (fuchūi) and without anxiety (mutońchaku) into the soul-stirring experience of this, so dense of just expired immortality, still early Saturday afternoon, anno Domini, genius loci.

* * *

The watering of the flowers, using a small bottle, is being conducted (performed, done) by a woman whose hands only (the hands of an elderly lady) are seen from here (the room), and even that at a sharp angle. [The whole endeavour is so much in a straight line that her action, attentiveness, and care can be be observed only at the instant when, until then holding the deadened bottle with her suitable fingers, she vivaciously protrudes it to spray a bouquet of surprisingly wide (like in a water-lily), bruised-green leaves - the emboldened cuts of boldness]. Meanwhile (in a predetermined corner), a spider traps a fly. It weaves the fly’s fate postponing the final triumph, waiting to grow up overnight. ("What a tangled web we weave, When we practice to deceive", c/o S.L.). [The fact that, besides the uneven war between two peripheral but persistent creatures, I observe how the hands of once light-minded woman now, in her old age, expertly (wisely, splendidly) solidify the pot of suddenly contemplated, capricious, remaining flowers, the two practical fighters (one fighting for its life, the other for glory) probably consider as an impractical deviation, politely keeping to their clash, not transferring it to my territory]. Both processes (happenings) - the watering of the anxious flowers using the beneficial little bottle, and the sagacious fight of the two cautious beings for universalness of the afternoon - are today’s shows of the world, during a kind of hopelessness, after Leander, a young man of Abydos, swimming the Hellespont to visit priestess Hero, drowned. Events of larger importance are based on the same principles on which are based these, at first sight insignificant incidents: the flowers, full of gratitude towards the reliable admirer (and, because of that, in a form of vines, stuck to the outside walls of her apartment - the faithfully intertwined state of Laurus nobilis, the aromatic and impressive shrub of laurel, with greenish-yellow flowers and black berries, whith which, shaped in wreaths made of its leaves, heroes and scholars were crowned in ancient times), reveal themselves by one’s generalized exigency; the insect and vermin solve their exaggerated insignificance (so overstressed that it becomes suspicious) in such a way as to halve it: at this very moment, the deep-felt large, ill-made and yet full of regardfulness fly succumbed - hastily determines its fortune the small (victoriously spry) spider, orderly stacking threads of today’s attack as the best defense like Horatius Cocles, the hero who held the wooden bridge leading into Rome against Lars Porsena’s men until the Romans had time to cut it. Suaviter in modo, fortier in re. The affection between the woman and the flowers on one side, and the avoidance of personal responsibility for the collision of small organisms on the other - that would be a brief conclusion about this day (a Sunday afternoon, spirit measured by reticency), if the events would stay at that. But, as always, from them the others will spring up, the more complex moves and solutions (up to the clumsiness of infatuation), significance will be increasing (as the day progresses) up to the late afternoon’s proportions, after which the evening call will be trumpeted. Events: the first, necessary stage in setting the ground foundations under all this immense (around the day foamed by nothing), more or less incomprehensible, dependent on a minimal attention and bounded war, ad internecionem.

* * *

08/05-07/96

(Object and Word). About some notion stories can be told, different (often opposed) words can be used, it can be approached from either one or the other side, both in this and the other way it can be acknowledged (reacted to), it can be announced as either favourable or unfavourable information, anything can be done with it (so attractively ambivalent: see in dictionary under politician, attorney, priest) except to make it to mean truth at a moment of danger - the actual portrayal of the object which it represents. (Truth is lost by too much controversy - Per troppo dibatter la verità si perde). (Doubleness of notion, rouge et noir, "The king of birds nested within his leaves", Howell. Who is nested here, the king or the birds?). Having arrived to such a point, the one who occupied himself with that got cornered: at reach of the actual word for the actual object he is left with neither one, a possible explanation and description of that which he went for were here, in front of him, in the apprehensiveness and attack of fluency, in generocity and wave of heresy, in all which perfected itself so much letting the object and its word to freely float, as a neurasthenic couple, eye-catching for hunt, for sacrifice to Lorelei, a siren of the Rhine who lures men to destruction. But, neither the word reveals the object, nor the object discloses the word: there ties them together the indivisibleness, singularity, circle of the same target, imaginary realm of sleep and dreams, known as the land of Nod. What one of them filled (the object), the other described (the word), and what one saw through (the word), the other embodied (the object): in the unquestionable pair one is defended by the other, hidden behind the other’s victory - it didn’t happen yet that a right word was found for an object, or that a word was rounded off by a right object. (Looking for the right, Б. Миљковић discovered too strong word - this speaks of the danger and complexity of that kind of search, quem di dilligunt adolescens moritur). In the best moments, we use only the closest words, but even that is sufficient for the object and the word to, at such instants, significantly look at each other before squeezing in still deeper, into the common abode, a hatch of the mutual duty and obligation, ouï-dire.

* * *

Iodine: It is only morning and already a bigger bite and significance is sniffed (at least a day as warm as yesterday): even to an early hour there protracts a tail full of authenticated heat. (A steaming of Nemean Games, a festival held in a valley of the same name in Argolis, consisting chiefly of athletic and musical contests, roars from the hands of the Ancient dawn, throws through the window the disk of the Sun). (In spite of that there are so many of them here, of hoed up pretence in a belt of expectation) even the trees do not compete with the inspired reason, and so how could something more negligible and smaller (even frivolous, with its diminution it is aware of its extent)? Only two, or three pigeon-like birds, but in principle smaller (forgotten sparrows), as recently as a moment ago mildly disappeared in the fall of the roof, cover themselves with an initial experience instead of with a prelude - long will be this day, one should use it wisely as to not to be proclaimed an infidel like Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the fifth century, who was deposed and banished as a heretic for maintaining that divinity and humanity existed as two distinct natures and were not unified into a single personality, totis viribus. The instinctive commencement (this morning, too) spins around the question of the whereabouts of last night’s obsession with all of this, with the principled curiosity about the self and its, at the same place, continuation from yesterday. For, it could have happened otherwise, the awakening didn’t have to occur in the case that all of this, with stereotyped lack of consideration (from Nebiim, the books of the Prophets), was suddenly despised. (Taedium vitae - weariness of life). Such an ultimate calmness (and everyone in his place), and yet something doesn’t match: like a raft directed into capturing a leisure, but stopped at the first obstacle, non obstante veredicto - the verdict opposite to the jury’s decision. As if there lacks some iodine (of a proven song), something out of bathing in presumptively these but, in fact, other mornings, in a dense race of impressions from the train with state insignia (on the mentioned raft - a station, on the station - a fig-tree, on a fig-tree - a leaf, under a leaf there blossoms an opportunity): it is felt the lack of iodine, of that which used to cure the dark and navy blue while cruising upon common devotion towards Naïas, the nymphs in charge of fresh water and springs, in a manner of heavy ink - the impermeable liquid from the spilled meaning, a task without a stain - tâche sans tache.

* * *

(Scribblers and Writers). One who is in a difficult situation writes something (puts down that which, he thinks, fully and hence movingly revealed itself to him). Although, a good many of them (who are in trouble) do not write anything - they abstained from even such a fluid deliverance: the perfection of pen and paper (so that they, full of imperfection, wouldn’t be tempted to use them), amidst their bitter search for expressiveness, is that which tortures them, as if it is to do with Delian problem, the problem of finding the length of the side of a cube when the volume is doubled, so termed from the advice of the oracle of Apollo at Delos (a small island in the Aegean Sea), that the plague then raging would cease were the cubical altar doubled. Whereas, the one who is out of trouble is not keen to write anyway, besides that he doesn’t have time for it. Ignoti nulla cupido. Those, therefore, who’re in some sort of mismatch with remarkableness of the primary representation of the world [who are, thus, in a difficult situation and describe it as such (full of extravagance of the writing set) until, like an antler, it passes by their spine - antocularis as a graded comfort of a humble afternoon], those writings of theirs they put away under the feet of their own flawlessness, leading the latter to a suspicious dance with itself in an expertly equipped (sonorous) hall, echoing with no end nor thread, full only of a lonely centre. So, they write about War and Peace as about Unbearable Lightness of Being, about Les Misérables as about Sense and Sensibility, about Crime and Punishment as about Garden and Ash, about Revisor For Whom the Bells Toll, about Old Man and the Sea as about Dead Souls, about Mademoiselle as about Waiting for G., about Непочин-plays as about playing-dolls-in-the-Field, in a word: about the hungry satiety of completed eternity. ["Where is the big day and we in it small, A huge watch-tower chasing us like a ball, While running towards Tisa (a piece of gold), Where is the clay (under the Sun) - so bold?", Ст. Раичковић]. And, when they choose lighter topics, they do that to mask the heavier ones.

(Dulce est desipere in loco). But, there writes (quibbles, scribbles) one more kind of people: sufficiently self-assured, they are neither in a difficult situation nor are they out of it - they’re hunted by the haughtiness of their crime, strutting of the job done. Of course, they by no means are some real writers; rather, they are speech-writers as well as writers of instructions, sentences, protocols, sanctions, scenarios, processes, commentaries, ordered studies, and detailed urban plannings of the Alliance’s bombardments - in a word, they’re scribblers. And, as it goes, in spite of their passion for writing (furor scribendi), their works are somehow empty, clerical, with the writer’s role of distrust with respect to a favourably ended fable they have nothing in common - the supercilious first-rate evaluation of theirs feverishly shoes them with metal into a weasel, with the same teeth they break up and torment both the letters and the victim, until a (disguisedly elegiac, full of enhusiasm) lone man (homo multarum litterarum) describes them, or some larger wolf tears them apart (homo homini lupus). Homo sui juris.

* * *

08/08-09/09/03-06/96

(Works on the Soul). What is to be expected from the unwariness of a premature conclusion - the assuredness of abundant privileges of the bird, additionally loaded with a relatively slow and thus fundamental (industrious) flight from one thought to the other, as if a larger work is being taken care of, or a more remunerative plan is being realized. [The concentration of evaporized water in the air disperses from the eyes the advantegs of the sea/river: a consent to the stableness of these two waters would only (otherwise - unprepared) leak down the cheeks of a deranged sublimity]. Advantages of summer. Festina lente. Feu de joie. [Like in the book "How Things Work (The Physics of Everyday Life)", by Louis Bloomfield, which one could think of as if in it, under so pompous a title (typical here), the author assailed (guera al cuchillo), no more and no less but the doubleness of a web (in the void of a room as in the break of a soul), or the incompleteness of shutting-off the kitchen faucet (not shut-off to the end, it pretends that it is at the new beginning), or the demiurge as a lower-class creator (according to Plato’s followers: a secondary deity, skilled workman, the creative spirit who made the world; according to Gnostic philosophers: a God subordinate to the Supreme God, sometimes considered the originator of evil, or identified with Jehovah) - but there is nothing of that in the book, L.B. throws himself into explaining the workings of a light bulb, household scale and jet engine, while from principles he chooses the principle of a resonant cavity in a microwave oven as well as the ferromagnetic principle - he skipped jute, a fibrous substance (Corchorus olitorius & capsularis), used for making burlap, sacks, mats, and rope. Hunc tu Romane caveto! The same, or similar, comment is applicable to the book by S. Pinker, "How the Mind Works", with which the author joins the drinking off the computerizing as the magic drink of this age; according to him, the mind is a computer and human nature is a result of the natural selection (!?), as if a computer is the final description of (the mechanism of) one, and not his (his cognition’s) first approximation, of the lowest order, and as if, besides nature, there does not exist non-nature (with its selection, too)]. While everything else long ago collapsed into an indistinct portion of our biography, this (before our eyes) excessive summer is being crowned by a contemporary obsession: nothing so far stretched itself like it did (except waiting before an important misunderstanding), nor did anything shrink [into such a ball, half full of its own, and half of (picked from today’s field) immobile complexity]. Between the time of hope and time of hopelessness: the carefulness of indigo - time cures everything, from thoughtfulness of experience to engrating ways of prejudice. Of course, time cures everything, but stupidity the most. A chance for a clear music tone this morning (while one beast drinks another from the depths of its eyes, full of covenant) looses its battle (progress as the aria of mobility): while we were digging, pulling, and plowing it - the hope was maintained, as we abandoned these, manual and thus essential works (in hoary jaws of a malformed universe), it (the cosmos), having lost the feeling of co-operation too (having reared in a pioneer way), shaked off from itself this morning as well, into the ditch of unutterability. With it (the ineffableness), it offers its charms from yesterday, keeping its arguments for tomorrow. Heu pietas! Heu prisca fides! Having stopped with the (just started) works on the (regulation of) soul, we expect a sudden scholarliness of solitude, a little bit of nobleness, an incidentalness of intention of improvement, in that order, by that descent, in totidem verbis.

* * *

Before the Rain: Stillness, and yet as if something (more burdened with sense) reproachfully trembles beneath the electrostatic veil. (The immovable condition of yellow and green equivalent, a boggy calm dressed in the lurking of Ganymede, carried to heaven from Mount Ida by an eagle, to be the cupbearer and serve wine to the Gods). Something which, melodiously like a harp, by the shadow of the tree-line, presses both animals and people: the sleepy symbolism of a trophy flash, a prolonged season of the interpretation of sense. {A stable man, relying on reason like a moose (Alces americana) on sight, firmly steps out every morning at eleven past six, orderly extinguishes his (full of the tranquility of smoke) cigarette at twelve past six, succeeds in starting his car on the second try, looking rather gentlemanly although wearing worker’s clothes [to keep the balance he puts on dark glasses (he may be a disguised agent but that would be too obvious and bizarre)], not finding (in all of that) anything unusual (or disturbing), acting (to the least detail) with the conviction and rationality of a white heron, not giving up the contenance of an empty pond}. [Last night, during the live broadcast of the opera "Les Misérables" (by V. Hugo’s book) over a non-commercial TV channel, collecting the pledges (to keep the channel running) during the pause of the performance, they were showing T-shirts with the book/opera title inscripted on them, offered at $50 a piece while the book itself, containing 1,222 pages, according to the Barnes & Noble catalogue for this month, costs $9.98. Of course, the problem is not in the price difference (after all, the shirt is only a return symbol of appreciation for the donation), it is rather in the character of these times: who is going to read all these pages up, isn’t it much more convenient to wear the title, con diligenza?]. Neither the two, medium-sized, properly trimmed trees (of which the one to the right, numbed, if looked at more carefully, represents a head of a Pharaoh, or a Senator, so immortal is its appearance, in spite of the fluffy enamel) put out the sense of the moment, on the contrary - they blossom it by the branch/leaf, by the revival of wisdom before the piled-up storm, by the skillful avoidance of classical spots, by questioning the obsoleteness of the season, indisposition of the wind. Such an experience is good to count with (to not be imposed upon by the equilibrium shallowness), when one finds himself in a situation like this, when a wrong step brings into question the obsequious aggrandizing of fickleness, the jumping out of a dominant miracle to the surface of the tidy lawn, the masterly assembled insolence before the usual rain, à fleur d’eau.

* * *

(The End of the Season). The noticably shorter days (the later mornings, earlier evenings) also more easily (quickly) forget all that was bad: the longevity of those, just expired (shamelessly longer) summer days does not trouble them, nor are they compressed into the mouse hole of winter days - they’re somewhere in between, à brass ouverts. The day breaks, therefore, with increasing difficulties: in a little while, such a postponing (due to, allegedly, more pressing jobs, rolled into all the more lucrative autumn) will turn into a dangerous habit, which costed even the more important things their heads - shrinking all the time, they ceased to exist (ab imo pectore). A pale mist of an unassuming afternoon, a silenced pack (sometimes a flock) of burnt beliefs into revulsion - in the medicinal evenness of tractability and inconsideracy, like in a silenced goblet of cajolery, the same wrinkle of the world is served at all times: one more season is over (like a spent metaphor, the dried up rivulet of Undina, a female water spirit, the sylph of the air). [The ratio of sharpness and obtuseness (of universal error and local exactitude) - the exposition of a hot head, the impassive basis for reconcilableness of Thyrsis (a herdsman in Idylls and Eclogues) with the story-telling method of Theocritus and Virgil]. Not having where to go and how, having arrived into the described (same) situation, reducing to the more or less careful observer of uncorruptible truths (the official representations of the beginning and end, without a middle different from the prescribed one, ab ovo usque ad mala), strolling (in thoughts) towards the bruised incautiousness of the past leap (returning to reason), our role in a recently finished season solidified: at the first shorter shot we have silently left (in a hurry resounded, in a walnut-tree shielded) the bowling alley of increasingly emphasized thriftiness - the condensed feature of September.

* * *

(The Pendulum). That which was and that which is forthcoming justify each other, presenting themselves as inevitable. (As if nothing else was, nor will be, hanging like ПРОГРЕСС, ГАМАК, modus operandi). A certain (small) disturbance of heather (the minor result of a crop, harmony of incidentalness), of a herculian animal or of an abandoned unit for liquid, serve to confirm the imprudence of the past and future concordance - a crowd always rises in ecstasy and calms in disappointment, it grows from the leaf in herbarium, falls into Populistic habit, mole ruit sua. A restrained portrayal of the path of Comus, the God of revelry: up the steep and winding road (up the obelisk of the hill) one climbs the height (imitates gardening), strides through the apples reduced to compote, above the valley (the safe heaven of descent, the lower limit of picture) with two, at most three horses, which silently feed on oats (their heads bent down), then in a light gallop move from one to the other side of the wheat: the humming of its brightening can be heard (mollia tempora fandi) - there reverberates the hyperbolism, the connectivity of a hydra with eight of its nine heads, it lures with the unfinished appeasement (mors janua vitae), with something which lives off such a snapshot, sways between one piece of furniture and the other (foams in hexagonal vindication of gypsum), in Euclid’s plane with the Elements of oats, barley and rye, something subordinate but nutritious like Eucalyptus, weak towards the hierarchical improvisation of a myrtle, cut by the swinging griffin (half lion, half eagle), the pendulum stopped when it is fastest - between a cat and a bird.

* * *

(Getting Up). A thin woman gets into a dusty car, futilely moves it into a mechanical participation, a (medium built) man obstinately jogs down the omnious (everyday) street, without a visible result. [It’s early (white like saccharin C₇H₅O₃NS), their activities are premature, not bringing a desirable change, al fresco]. (A bird snapped at the fate, cawing its understandable anger, another one climbed on Mab, the Queen of fairies, filling up her crown with the easiness of twelve Higher Gods, of the superior class - dii majorum gentium). One (undeterminable) man gets into a white half-truck/half-farewell, stops thinking about unimportant things, sketches the invention from last night’s coma but, since the morning advances all the more steadily (as, even here, it is conciliatory said), the fog before his eyes increasingly disperses and he, a witness of the unprovable grandiosity, dernier ressort, lets himself being absorbed by a routine ride to the first curve, at which he disappears forever. (Empressement). Empty, there snorts the bus, a widened garbage truck stops in front of the unbridgeable obstacle (the brilliance of the cleanliness and order, attached to the soil - adscriptus glebæ), an obsequious grammarian (directed by his trade into the uselessness of words, wherever the book opens - ad aperturam libri) discovers the golden rule in vagueness instead of in tangibility, a large country shoots its own emptiness upon the small one, characterized by a rebellious excitement - this foppish day will not so easily present itself to anyone, in spite of that it was promised on the public scene by the austerely dressed enthusiasts of spiritualism, Deo volente. Adorer le veau d’or. A man and irony, dog and finale in its eyes, lucidity and tattle, Egeria and King Numa Pompilus who, from that nymph, received the instructions in regard to religious institutions - all that which in a panic jumps into the last hope, enabling us to again insolently get up, each into one’s own small hell and polished hush.

* * *

The Fog: (Already) unclear, the morning is due to the fog (additionally) impenetrable. Even the ambition of the beginning doesn’t help it, it loses itself already there, falls into the end before the termination, into Jacobinism without radicalness. Still that which, until a moment ago, was explainable - sprayey, it wrapped itself into the ceremony of water (into the glueyness of water drops as of crumbs in bread). (Inexplicability - extolling in front of a lessened sight. To not see anything besides the massive, thriftless thought of isokratia: a system of government in which everybody has equal political power). Even if fog later disperses (which eventually will happen) and the day breaks, its effects will be remembered: it was that (the fog) which concealed the role of the class in power, suggestively reduced the sharpness of display of the world, falsely presenting it as more learned and milder.

Ce n’est pas être bien aise que de rire. (Rebelliousness as suddenness of getting settled, a single-headed state as foggy enlargement of a single colour - the isochromatic growth of a biaxial crystal, proof of separateness: "Why this intrusion? Were not my orders that I should be private?", Addison). As if sharp and strong forces do not exist, and as if the indispensability of the lace embroidery (full of the mortality of a mother) reduces to the exaltation of water - the poultice of ancient work, afternoon under the knitting-needles, bona fide. Occupied as much by the fog as by the thoughts, the almightiness which carefully regarded this morning as well (then it befogged, stopped polarizing features of the transgression) will not realize itself for a long time - having traditionally made itself thin above a wide (lazy) river, striped like an anaconda (a tigrish Python), the fog is being brought into the state of narrative disloyalty, covered with the melancholy of omniscience, with the neuralgy of a satin sheet, with an easy explanation of something more difficult, laid beyond the reach, ben trovato.

* * *

09/09-11/96

(Grocka). Why things are like this and not like that (why the empty bus descends down the street when it is still unclear - it’s too early - whether anyone is ever going to get into it), how come this sequence is the only one possible - more exactly, the only one realized (the others were, likely, possible too but, as far as they’re concerned, it stayed at that), finally, what is that which this variant has whereas the others don’t (didn’t) have, so that everything goes on in this way only - at the first look, these are panic questions but, actually, they’re rational and calm, with their answers on the other side of a Möbius strip, a surface with only one side, formed by giving a half twist to a narrow, rectangular strip of paper and then pasting its two ends together. As much as all of this presents itself (exclusively) in this way, it does not mean that one doesn’t deal with a certain plane, underneath which all the other ways today only a bit more renounce themselves. (Perhaps a small spark may lie hid - Lateat scintillula forsan). Are they forced to do that or (according to a regardful agreement) it is (again) to do with distribution of today’s impressions to the registering and interpreting ones, it is unknown. (Where and how to find a witness of toilsome reconditeness of Minos, the King of Crete, son of Zeus by Europa, who after he died became one of the three judges of the dead in the lower world, with Aeacus and Rhadamanthus?). The only thing which is missing here (and, at that, compromitting such a barren concept of the organization/order) is a motionless noon above the pedantic scene with the distant Danube, caught with a quick glance from the strengthened terrace at the foot of Grocka (one, by the simulation of a fresh proceeding, appropriately introductory place), under the hands raised as protection between the Sun and the surrounding, allegedly coy hills down which the impression about the choice of the resting in a constant engrossment by cosmic respectability throws itself into the river (of officiousness of a programmed prism, mirabile visu, mirabile dictu), terminating the presumption about anything else of a larger importance, in other circumstances, at other places. Mirabilia, mirum in modum.

* * *

The report (at this early hour) reads: indivisibility of Brobdingnagian (anatomically ungovernable) air (a possible repeat of theoretically correct conclusion about the universal tragicomedy - if it wasn’t for its first part) reaches faultlessness. (In nuce). Nothing can be seen (recognized) and yet something sincerely testifies about the inevitability of a larger, although unapproachable presence, speaks about the coagulation of this arrangement as well, the hardened price of the remembering ahead, in aeternum. Someone, indeed, in actu, gets in the car (the insectum-like helmet of a many-sided iron-shod of escape), starts it, drives in the direction of regular rain above the cotton fields of exhaustive accentuation - cadence. Word by word, drop by drop - it doesn’t give up while (with difficulties) it searches for the solution. (The search for sense it wisely postpones until tomorrow). In such conditions, the fire hydrant placed at the strategic corner, full of the meaning of reason, is a sign of, therefore, someone’s fervor and preparedness, even if that of the municipality. (Such a silence only the cast iron can stand, later painted green, by the indigo of the field in which it grows, mixes with indoxyl C₈H₇NO). Everything which is concrete, simple, accessible and obvious, reduces to the noise of the dishes in the kitchen of the neighbouring apartment: through the wide open window there flows the entire wantonness for today (genus irritabile vatum) - the handlers of their own lives [as they prefer to present (think of) themselves] handle, again, only their echo. [It’s true that somewhere up there, in the absent-minded passengers, a plane produces the impression of the possibility of a vertical escape, but even the sound (of all the quieter engines), tuned to that direction, is only another change from seemliness to aptness, the full dress - grande toilette]. The dawn is nearing - the bragging of incessancy (the Gothic sputtering of self-confidence) is seen almost all the time until, presently in lamb’s skin, the next occurrence disperses it, from the calendar of inevitability, the agitated roughness of burlesque, perfected in a cathedralic way for the late report about an early threshold of sensitivity, a photon’s motto of a sundial: horas non numero nisi serenas.

* * *

In all the emptier space there is all the less doubt: nothing is as it looks when it is full, when it deceives so much. Ne puero gladium. (It presents itself in one, firm way, while it is based on another, contour-like. For example, this morning: it shows itself as if it is not melting, transiting to the pleasant reticency of lithium, the lightest metal, of alkali palate and salt gravitation). Known, but in itself it hides the unknown - it doesn’t open to the end at any price, it even forces the state officials (although, in charge of that) to search every corner of the (absent) subject’s thought, to find something remunerative for indoctrination, the medicine for its own misery, proof for nil desperandum. In the crevice in which we are, our condition neither worsens nor improves - in the loquacious choir it crumbles in a porcelain way, like the sculpture of Laokoön (a priest who warned the Trojans against the wooden horse) with his two sons, which (in the Vatican) breaks in the coils of the serpents, or (for those to whom such a story is more credible) it hashes up like all the smaller karma, the entireness of undertaking in this phase of existence, determining for the fate in the next phase, by this a less important. Burnt by last night’s candelabrum (the canonic form of attentive decoration), thrown onto the bottom of a deserted trench, as any other condition this one also has its pros and cons: its advantage is in the eternal struggle, its disadvantage in the lost war. (The work and lateness of its completion, the slow and painstaking polishing of a literal composition - Limae labor et mora). With that, one does not dispossess oneself of excitement, he only feels more lonely, hardened by the solo session: our only possible condition is our only choice because of which we, even in this, increasingly sunny morning, experientially (injuriously) direct ourselves to the favourite garden of Mentor (an image of a trusting adviser - a friend of Ulysses and the tutor of Telemachus - whose form Athene assumed in order to advise the latter two), to get a basket of fruits carefully picked from the rememberance of the times of all the more radiant defeats and greater courage of the key-keeper of such a mute key signature.

* * *

09/12-15/96

Practiced like a mandoline pulled tight, there hums a minute by minute of (by law permitted although a provocative and daring) behaviour: there hangs (rather descends) down the ephemeral thread, another morning, arbiter elegantiarum. {Like the one, bounded-with-green spider [which (yesterday) came so easily down to the concrete floor from the laboratory ceiling, and then, having left for someone or something its libretto (a sketched message from Homer, laudationes eorum qui sunt ab Homero laudati), it hurriedly returned with the same twine], this morning (only on a different fibre) does not differentiate between the conspiratorial beginning and parliamentary end - at any time it is at every place, stretched like a borrowed sand in the false desert, laus Deo, l’avenir}. [At this time a man and a woman normally come out towards their cars, saying goodbye to one another with a histrionic kiss (possibly demonstrating to themselves in a more convincing way the whole involuntariness of such a salutatory parting) - she, in her car, leaves straight down the street, he turns into the first street left. All other streets mean nothing to them - they conclude while their memories of each other are still fresh, although the cruel simplicity of these two streets bothers them]. The described minutes (thrown to a pile like to the mountain of Number Nip, a gnome king and mountain goblin in German tales): a risen-up sinking; also - a forgetfulness (of an anesthetized, chesnut-like being, Narcissus, a youth who fell in love with his own image as he saw it reflected in a fountain, and pined away and died), the thoughts which wandered away (into the Tales of Miletus, published by Bulwer-Lytton), abruptly arranged into the logical outcome in the case of Göethe’s Wilhelm Meister, a hero of the novel by the same name, a somewhat uninteresting young man whose character is later molded by his experiences in life. According to it (the generalized disentanglement), at favourable moments though, the things will keep on sparkling during the nights and hiding during the days before they, as is presently, get cut in half, one half as a lesser half of sense, the other not even that, a glowing language only - ardentia verba.

* * *

(A Case). Someone goes down the street with his dog (qui m’aime, aime mon chien), with the help of a flash-light (it’s as early as a childhood, simple as in a bathrobe, robe de chambre). After them (after the somnambulic tenor and rusty spaniel, perhaps), in a minute and a half, with easiness there comes down (again empty) the bus. (It falls to ruin by its own weight - Ruit mole sua). Now (at the moment) nothing happens. With that, the difference between happening and not happening is emphasized, as if something like that exists, as if both are not a function of the observer. Although, of course, neither of the two is conditioned by someone’s observation, still they wouldn’t be in motion if he (the observer) didn’t move the chance off their way (and the mask from their intention). Ruse contre ruse. That the man, dog and the matador-like covered (purplish empty) bus, passed by as they did, it was because the first two (the man and the animal), this morning too, felt in themselves a mausolean (that is, cosmic) disquietude beneath the night’s surface of the things, and came out to look for a cure (procul, O procul este, profani!), while the bus was feverishly looking for at least a single (decisive) passenger (pro Deo et ecclesia), although at that time all the passengers were in a routine sleep, or, in the other case, they were unwillingly waking up, having not completed their propitious unconsciousness in the form of a sphinx or Kehama, an Indian rajah gifted with supernatural powers but met with a wretched doom. In all of that, the observer is somehow neutral, on one side, without influencing the cause, development and effect of that which happens relative to that which does not happen, re infecta. However, if it wasn’t for him (according to the given matrice, pro forma), the dog would tear off from the leash at the earlier intersection, the owner would start running after it (turning to the right), that would change their route and they would not pass by here while at that, upper intersection, after a minute and a half, one, mainly reserved gentleman would get in the stopped bus, and, taking off his mask in the next moment and having taken the control of the vehicle from the not surprised (used to anything) remisso animo bus driver, he would promptly steer the bus (to the right, too), having passed along, after the minute and a half, that, upper road on which, suddenly (contrary to the original plan - a spontaneous predetermination of the path), there passed the man and the dog (until then already infected by the mild rabies of Keyne, a Celtic saint, noted for her well, near Liskeard, Cornwall, according to which folklore, whoever - of a bridegroom and his bride - drinks from it first, will be boss of the house), so that down here, in the soft fall of the foundation, the essential point of the observer, nothing would’ve happened which otherwise happened because of his perseverance to not let anything to a chance, malgré soi.

* * *

Such an enlarged quieting of the world can be explained only by an astronomical seemingness, a tangent of magnification, transition of a point to the mass, by Merlin - the enchanter in the legends connected with King Arthur, the predecessor of the Nato pact. A drop of last night’s rain ceremoniously falls down from the roof (in that fall, it sees everything to the end, but it’s late then), like a thrown glove it flies by the window, having gone in/out of the water (as it likes) with the picture from the hunt for extinct days (because of which the trembling groundwork of the world shakes even more): upon the (still wet) street there generously spills the increasingly unscrupulous departure, even the smallest return is removed with a bulldozer, rectus in curia. Everything that we departed from (everything we didn’t return to) found this hour for admonition. ("The curse of heaven and men succeed their evils", W. Shak.). It’s similar to another practicability (pretending that it is not offering frailness for fragility), but knows that neither here nor there the indivisibility of stillness tolerates complaint - it plays that card, réchauffé. Who wanted - he ran away, who didn’t - gradually, at a square under the fig-tree, he subsided, ratione soli. Who saw the new - before his eyes he spun the old (full of echo of strides, he sees no more); who fought with the old - he got used to it long ago (full of sympathy, he looks no more). Rideau d’entr’acte. For each one of them, such a (cartographically soothed) morning sews the scent of fibrous sorrowfulness upon the silky edge of courteousness. (Ride si sapis). One is cheerless because he halved himself pictorially, the other because he didn’t put himself together exactly. One makes up various excuses for such a drastic move, the other complains about the force larger than himself which, he says, keeps him in that (one) piece. Both of them, however, stand up quietly, as if nothing happened, one makes the tea, another the coffee (as a rule - in a machinal way), each looking through his window suspiciously, traversing the room in all directions (rethinking everything once more), then the one who departed - returns, while the one who stayed - leaves, both to/for the same. Only it, the same, waited for them at the enticing place of dissimilarity - only to it, hence, they stayed loyal, having apathetically thrown their differences into its idle yawn, full of the culture of flowers, the blameless flirting with the vivid weeds grown around stagnation, sweet-talkative around the change.

* * *

How with an ordinary talk, language, letters (the tools for portraying, tria juncta in uno) can all of this be described? (With regained humour by such, simpler than the permissible simplicity variant, that (all of this) plays with such tools without revealing itself: utcunque placuerit Deo - according to some; ut pignus amicitiae - according to the others). Still, even it (all of this, vaudeville) is not the same, it’s rather dual: knowable (valet de place) and unknowable (vehimur in altum). A portrayal of the knowable is proportional to the portrayer’s articulateness and wordishness: a more skilful (expressive) handler of letters (language, talk), abounding in words (master of verboseness), better describes that which is describable (comprehensible), but neither he, even tersely gifted (essentially articulated), achieves more than an arid (in more successful moments - a keen) desription, or, if he really is of an ultimate smithing, he portrays the subject of his portrayal once and for all (although that, too, is under a certain doubt of Gyges, a King of ancient Lydia fabled to have had a magic ring that rendered him invisible, thus helping him to slay his predecessor Candaules). As with regards to the unknowable, it is such because it exceeds every extent so that no language, speech or letters can describe it, voir le dessous des cartes. (Why would the indescribable submit itself to description? What would be its interest in that? The unknownness is its privilege, it may not be that it would get rid of it because of someone’s beautiful eyes, even if they belonged to Gudrun, the heroine of a German epic, a princess who was kept for years at servile drudgery, because she refused to marry against her inclinations). Nothing of that which is (through time) said or written (or it will be), can pretend to explain the unexplainable without being proclaimed as a laughable, frivolous stand, the stylishness of Gebir, a prince in an Eastern legend who invaded Africa and after whom Gibraltar was named. With further development of languages/letters, the portraying will go further as well but it is silly to expect that any acoustic/sign-based symbolism (which languages and letters are, mots d’usage) will be able to describe the temperature of the Sun, the distance to the stars and the brim of the mist in the old-fashioned soul of an eliptical cut, deceitful bottom. (Numerals do not count: even though they perform their job correctly - nec pluribus impar - they describe nothing, non libet). But, even that which is describable is sufficient: all the time jumping into the mouth, coming out of the eyes, peering through the paper - it actually pays court to the talk, language, letters, waving with the new solution before the eyes of the old one, full of the conceitedness of an elm, the unknowable epitaph in an insolent duel with the dialectical purpose of a camouflaged devil in ductile paradise, its mot du guet.

* * *

09/16-30/96

(Conversing With Walls). Whenever I look at them, the walls look at me (a certain, round trip by a luxury cruiser), attentively, with such an interest that one wonders how they didn’t start talking yet, at least as Busiris, a Pharaoh who is said to have sacrificed to the Gods all foreigners who entered Egypt, in order to prevent a famine, but he himself drowned in the Red Sea, or was slain by Hercules, all the same, so much are his words full of silence since then. Self-denial, an estimation (while walking between rather small, with calcareous alphabet whitened planes of sauciness) is their way of watching a dweller as a weak point of dwelling: the other possibilities (the spider in the hunt, the hunt in the fly, the fly in the web) do not attract their eyes - full of the unpleasant permanency, each of these walls clings to me as if only I am not collapsing, as if the true reliability does not radiate from Blouzelinda, a country girl in Gay’s pastoral poems, natural and uncultivated, such as one might really meet, and not a figure from an ideal Arcadia. [Although, having only myself as company, this wall ahead, these two on the sides, and that one at the back, they didn’t get used to looking at anyone else - a couple of insects in the checkmate (understandably impatient) disappeared again - nor do I, in this situation, have at my disposal anything firmer between the alert floor and cautious ceiling, no Al Sirat, a slender and sharp bridge over the abyss of hell, which all must cross to get into paradise]. Returning to each other a small but significant care - the piercing look of an investigator full of merciful conversation - and besides that they (the walls) address me quite informally, I requite with scepticism (how could a wall comprehend anything of this, bêtise). But, looking (I at the walls, they at me)) for such a long time, we’ve arrived at a point where we understand each other better than do friends/buddies among themselves, even though their friendship is characterized with a greater versatility, including a phone (standard, mobile) conversation, writing letters (although, this is rare nowadays), or shooting the breeze in a restaurant garden (à la carte). Of course, none of that is possible to do in the company with the walls, but then, whenever I return to my room after work or, like early this morning, let myself listen to their knowing silence, they arrange themselves (first unobtrusively, then all the more persistently) into a condition of a shell, a vessel, a reservoir for collecting the stiffness of our looks which, having crossed halfway between me and one, at the first glance indifferent, but in fact full of the sympathy and collaboration surface (audiatur et altera pars), carefully retreat downwards (arrectis auribus), extinguish in a cobaltous manner (en passant), ceding to today’s civility the collar bone of an inaudible chat participantly cloaked with the planes of adulatory simpleness.

* * *

(Between Two Bus Stops). Even though it’s quite certain that there is nothing left of the summer, the careless ones propose returning to its beginning (to that nice day when everything was possible). Καλο ταξιδι! [As if by returning to an earlier link one solves anything from today’s chain, and as if last night’s rain (checking the climbing to ВЕРХ, the endurance of Mowgli, the hero of Kipling’s "Jungle Books", lost in a forest and brought up by Mother Wolf) didn’t disperse at the first blow of the wind]. [As if all of us are not spied upon by that (same) thing which tenaciously yawns, spreads over the head of sense in the way in which, until recently playful but already in fresco, the carved cloud sets beneath the dome of a gravitational gondola, under the feet of the proven doubler of a cheetah - the leopard (Felis pardus), and in a victorious run leans over the notion of kneeling down: ПРАВОТА in curia]. ("Who would the miseries of man foreknow?", Dryden). The significance of thinking, the boredom of larva, the rest of monolith - they thaw (in that order) on a trodden ravine of this morning, too. (In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas). The rationalization of things went too far (the irrationalness never stopped) for anything to be taken differently from a given: according to the rationalists - everything is screwed in, in a logical and explainable way. (During that time, the irrational ones make the opposite error: their state is that of an approximativeness, without the necessary economy of a solution, the humbleness of an offer). Κανατε λαθοσ. A plane buzzes, the rain stops (everything will dry now, like India-rubber): at the bus stop there gets into the bus a thought about the absurdity of the so-called schedule through this place through which there roars (cunningly hums) the intelligibility of the idea about a house and a yard like joined vessels of the touch of ПОРЫ between this and the other stop of the doubtlessness as the only passenger upon the hushed up essence of a larger duty. Εχασα το δρομο μου. Που ειμαστε? Που βγαζει αυτος ο δρομος?

* * *

(Глина, lit. Clay). If, at least, something of this were original, instead of (unfortunately, as is the case) repeating itself. At the first look new scenes, unrepeatable events, and unique experiences - are actually from before. Only their form/technology changes, not the content/ topology. ["For in and out above, about, below / It is nothing but a Magic Shadow - Show / Play’d in a Box whose candle is the Sun / Round which we Phantom Figures come and go (run)", Omar Khayyam, XII century (c/o B.L.), motto of the scientific paper/book "Cosmic Topology", by M.L.Rey and J.P.Luminet, which, besides in a library, can be found on the Internet, copia verborum]. And so, my wife had a grandfather (on her mother’s side), whom she (as it goes in that part of the world) never saw and, therefore, didn’t have anything to remember him by except the story according to which, sometimes after the end of the W.W.I., he left on a voyage across the ocean to this continent, spent on it no more and no less than ten years, toiling and moiling in some steel-works (were it the one in Gary, Ind., which so many times we so innocently passed by?), and then, as he promised that he’d do it, and because he was (the story says) a man of his word, aboard the other ship he returned to his wife and children (that was somewhere over there, around Петриња and Глина), only to, after a couple of years, die (and, after him, his wife, cara sposa); their children became orphans (they were between the ages of a kindergardener and young school children), W.W.II. came (a work of Jagannath, the ruler of men and beasts, an incarnation of Vishnu, in the form of the lord of the earth), and the grandfather’s leap between the two wars rounded off as it is appropriate from the literature point of view. Cos ingeniorum, ПОТЕХА. At times, I think of that man (although for me, too, he is only such a story), I deliberate what could have been going through his mind during so early and already written off mornings, or in the nights as deep as the flour in a water-mill, in those years, in such a terrible place (suspicious, did you, maybe, pass through it as well?), where even the strongest persistency dissolves into a boiled iron, a slag and jewelry ingredients from the feast of a lone man’s absurdity. Didn’t he then, like I’m doing now, try to catch a word during its fall (to write it down into his worn-out notebook), trying not to fail at least it (the word) once he already did it with those (ten) years, ceded to the gypsy tent? And what did he, in general, think about all of this (of such a constant), did he socialize with someone, what newspapers (or, maybe, books) did he read (if he read anything at all, that is, if he didn’t abandon that too)? What did his room look like (what kind of furniture did he have), what did he do on Sundays (the working days he would expire in the sweat of his brow, for so much less torturing himself in his head - there believes the quasi-elite), which secret sign in a frozen February sky (glassed with Coma cluster) did he make the deal with to keep his word about coming back to Глина (Glina)? (Nowadays he couldn’t return there, but that’s another story). It must be that his name was Милан or Јаков or Илија and that he smoked, perhaps he liked an extra drink (even he must have had a vice), in any case it is not probable that he would turn into a descent puritan, even if he stayed longer than the 10 years there, around Chicago.

Which he didn’t. Exactly ten years after, he packed himself, put his whitened, heavy, dress shirt on, combed through his moustache down once more, danced in his heart, got in the ship, got out to the short-lived salvation, earth to earth, that is clay to clay, solum to humus, quantum to quantum. Cap à pié.

* * *

(The Alarm). Ten minutes of staring at a blank space (the idling step) of this page of paper got broken by an alarm device, from outside. [A car probably (an unreliable apparatus, secured by all possible means), or an early Christian sect of Phantasiastes (denying the reality of His body) - it must be something of that nature which activated itself]. The alarm lasted for a short time (it means that it was false), not a full 30 seconds, but, having risen me up, it made me to start to, upon the excavation of guarding, the blandishment of a shield, arrange α, β, γ, δ,..., which led me to ΟΔΟΕ street to ΠΛΑΤΕΙΑ square to ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟ museum to ΚΑΣΤΡΟ fortress in the head’s center: mega biblion, mega kakon - a great book is great evil. [These letters (l’empire des lettres) one ought to, I see, harness into something: a trifling beginning (late portrayal) of a light blow - and, sooner or later, it will find its bearings]. Letter by letter: a sign of transference - ВСКОРЕ, the morning starts to flow (to win the throne) more bearably. {With a bit more optimism [as, here, it is a (sponsored) custom and convention], it (the morning) could turn into extolling, an exercise of suitable tactics, the enhancement of self-confidence: ВСТАТЬ!}. Important is, thus, an enticement (in this case - a false alarm, ГАМ), something which, at least for a moment, having disturbed the idyll of an Epicurean, in a diplomatic manner changes into the ambiguity of a tightrope walker, the fall to a gravure, melodiousness of the assembler of a factual essay, having awaken him from the empty yawn. Something small and unimportant, the death of a fairly large bird as an encounter with the unfair fate of the warm-blooded Vertebrata Aves, the etherealness of a factory siren in the dawn of an unpopular but orderly reported strike to the democratic authorities of the West, the immobility of the spread-load cars on a station full of the railway workers of liberal inclinations in the corners of the windows of the storage building built of serial (standard) bricks, emendatio as a stronghold of the stupidity of metamorphosis of the East, the haste walking of the unknown (and inevitable) man under the rain of unbearable suspicion - all that which can serve for the opening speech about this day, for the manuscript full of a personal hunt for red foxes: the illiterate protagonists of the general solution, swallen compromisers of honour, deceitful interpreters and actual beneficiaries of the theory of necessariness and sufficingness, lèse majesté coram nobis.

* * *

(The Error). Even the end normally reached by going around cannot be seen for days rhymed like these - they become antiquated only when their name is spelled in full. (When the adorned bilingualism of the archaic bibliophile leaks out from the corner light with the embalmed shade).

Day by day of universal truth, each by itself an old story: the axiomatic presumptuousness of prattle is only coming true.

Days as an increasing number of arithmetic desultoriness. Where do they lead to, what do they pour into (besides into arsenic, and after the ash-wood) - that is left to be seen. (Perhaps, they group together on their way to spontaneity, once the enforcement couldn’t affect them). What a magnificent oppressiveness, what a hundred-legged slavery: such a polite and suitable octopus would be desired by any sea bottom. Again, there is nothing from the baldachin freedom (when will the bureaucrats stop tattling?). Only they (the days full of microbial fitness) string up on the nitrogen necklace before the exultant rain as before the sinless conception, for the second time blaspheming Danaë, a princess shut up in a brazen tower, to which Jove gained access in the form of a golden shower, and thus became by her the father of Perseus. (In a zoo, even the scamps are aware of the spectacle - on both sides of the bars of Bacchanalia the free-mindedness is being hoarded up - that is why in such places the howling succeeds the best: amidst the deficiency of azureous heavens above the flowery heather, the insurrection of the animals is a normal state of delicateness of the universal ill).

(As much as, according to Deschan, a bird is a hole in the sky - a fish is a glass of water, water is the wolf of soil, soil is the heavenly glass). Everything for the illusion, nothing out of it. (As if the world is going to powerfully sweeten itself, to sink into the chocolate whirlpool). Clarior e tenebris.

In all of that, attention is deservedly attracted by the adventure of a pearly bug - gone into the story of prostration, it doesn’t seem to be disheartened at all. Perhaps, mysteriously, everything is based on it (including the baneful doggedness), although it is more probable that it figured that it is safest to stay aside (while the things clear up) from the despondency too, cæteris paribus.

With the notions and things disentangled (of the self-seeking saddled by a fitting proverb), having stayed with a provisory protection (a sort of first aid of the last apprehension) during a shorter transient) period (after which these days will also be written off by a decree as an orderly antiquity), we amuse ourselves with the defectiveness of a greater sense (full of the frailness of an antelope), with no visible imperfection except some ineffectualness of anthracite, almost a gentle error.

* * *

Even September has the burnt century as its last day. Sturm und Drang. Its referring to the conciliatory heat, after all, resembles a pompous gesture.

[In the building, there can be heard a monotonous, probably necessary racket. Like when, silenced, there rolls the grandiosity of a decisive moment, stacking this age as well between the past ones. Tristesse. Or it is to do (that’s more likely) with the routine noise of a refrigerator of an older make. Its sound accumulated (in the apartment) as much as all the other quieted down, withdrew to itself: not even an enterprise is taken as a praiseworthy example!].

It is only the tea lemon which keeps desirable properties: it smells like the unknowable, from a lesser it turns to a larger yellow. (It presents itself as if breaking off from weakness, all the more wrapping itself into it). Trahit sua quemque voluptas.

Also in this, the last day of September, everything is founded on the stroke of only one bell, the midnight one. (Τα μεσανυχτα - Midnight as the border of doubledealing).

Until then, it (the day), animated with the edge (tassel, ornamental hem) of the state of well-being, pretends that it deals with something more ideal (something third).

(Carved sublimity - and yet it flutters in the first wind, in susceptibility it finds the gourmand. АГА).

Long and carefully prepared, and still into unlearnedness poured September, full of eagerness of the front and convention of the back of all of this, transits after the yellow ant of the Sun from the heliographic crack of the summer to the bulletproof vest of autumn, the new armour of the old, into Talos, a wonderful man made of iron by Vulcan and equipped with (also an iron) flail, with which he is to execute the October justice.

* * *

10/01/96

(A Chill). Bellicose October, slantingly hazed with fascination (this is its first morning, as soon as tomorrow that will be rectified, turned into a heroism), mindfully moved into consciousness - only a stereotype of Revolution still behaves like that.

[This month emphasizes the uprising even with its fissure - the atomic purity of simulacrum’s notio, at the threshold of a deep-red (nowadays, unfortunately, a speculative) metal, testifies about the spite still on the surface (going deeper, the accent is increasingly on the mastership of the blade, Mars gravior sub pace latet). As if this month signifies the break with the archival approbation of the previous eleven].

Magnas inter opes inops.

The essence of the rose fragrance (ether) in October too - this can last forever if, like griffus (Gyps fulvus, a vulture, an eagle from the front, lion from the back), after it starts flying, it is permitted to continue to roar. Manet alta mente repostrum.

Inside the apartment, I harken (something always radiates from somewhere - I peek, therefore, into the nonexistent rooms as well, materiam superabit opus): I reckon that all that which eternally buzzes sharpens its wings for the invasion onto such a gold-bearing morning, full of amalgamative anthropology - the melted science about K., the hero of F.Kafka’s "The Castle", a land surveyor whose fruitless efforts to enter the subject of the novel (the castle) are symbolic of a man’s striving for divine grace which, of course, he can reach only by climbing atop himself, then surveying and digging all that underneath.

Me judice.

I walk to the kitchen [to see whether the tea soothed (while waiting for a miracle) because of evaporating into ПОКАЗ of the omnipotent indifference of the morning] - by the chestnut-like (inflammable) vengeance of the web, swung by the earthly wind, I conclude that there is still a hope. (As long as this month is going to last, its symbols will ring conspiringly, its allegoric shield and ceremonious spear will not end up in the anecdotic weeds/thorns of A.F.Kerensky - I encourage myself, wrapped into the poster of Lantier, the leading character of E. Zola’s social novel "Germinal", a coal miner and labor agitator).

At the occurrence of a precious, although ambiguous colour - the metal-red shading into ambrosia, the food of the Gods (providing immortality even to Lambro, a Greek pirate in Byron’s "Don Juan", the father of Haidee, having his headquarters in a small island of the Aegean, and being "the mildest-mannered man that ever scuttled ship or cut a throat") - something melts, then hardens and cleans: red like copper, this morning alchemically leans over the world’s foundry, above the singular crowd lined up in the queue for the vessel of a carved hope (a drop of alkali beneath a Jovian tree) to have (from it) a sip of today’s chill, full of the aesthetics of a (subversive) association - its easiness in dealing with October’s agitator and November’s palpability of the 1917-th justice.

* * *

10/02-04/96

Something impartial should also be said (to quiet the passions like a stranded boat does). Καλημερα. Something in the sense that all of this mildly swings: it doesn’t have direction nor wicked intention. (It knows nothing about war). (It behaves civilly). With such an act of giving evidence, an impartial state would be achieved, the confrontation with average deliberation avoided. But, one would fall into ambivalence. On one side to talk about the beauty of the lull, on the other to suffer from it. ЗАГАР. That is why one should abandon that approach as well and, in a raised tone, say all the trouble. But to whom/what? (At this deaf hour, only a touching state flows into the sensibility without an opposition, into the weightless ЕРЕСЬ). In whatever way to address the collosal vacancy (Hannibal ad portas), we aren’t going to startle it from the fulfillment with nothing, from the word occuring only once - hapax legomenon. Still, picking upon it and nagging, we force it to move its ears, to hit with its tail. (A wild boar has a hard time giving up its burrow, but also has a hard time breathing - the everlasting doubt bugs it in the form of ascetic flies. Fronti nulla fides). Wrestling with the massiveness of uninterestedness, it is left to us to describe it to the end. ("One shouldn’t succumb at any cost", as it is, until the next signing of surrender, wisely and in a stately manner said, having lifted the chin up and thrown the look into the skies, to the Gods, epulis accumbere divum, remaining always that one - the same, temporary in salvation, eternal in defeat, Epicuri de grege porcus). A pious fraud - fraus pia. (To not let the bitterness yield before the announcement of Medea, the daughter of a King of Colchis, a sorceress who helped Jason to carry off the golden fleece while he, after ten years of marriage, deserted her). In the same way in which it (the uninterestedness) dives onto us, we ought to laugh at it. To get into it (the uninterestedness) by a smile through the sweetened bottom, up the adjectival conch of acrostic to climb onto the prosaic folds on the cape of the Milky Way (the udder-like disguise of a pregnant eclipse), before it itself bursts into a healthy lough, emerged from the expertly diminished knowledge, e re nata.

* * *

By the building (in a great distance, though), there passes the wind, train, something that is well-born and by so much unstoppable: there shifts from one side to the other a, still sombre but also very extensive, morning. (There descends down the street the extorted peace: progressively less of it remains for the last shadow, armful - ОХАПКА). The heating season started - the end proceeds into the beginning: water (again) circulates through the radiator. (Everything has its cycle, carefully concentrating on it, sniffing its tint - ОТТЕНОК). A basis is being recognized to the very sound of the world - why wouldn’t it to the solitude? (Murmur of the world - something which, after all, curls up in its corners, an outermost manfulness of commencement, the family of Zodiac: "The Ram, the Bull, the Heavenly Twins / And next the Crab, the Lion shines / The Virgin and the Scales / The Scorpion, Archer, and the Goat / The man who holds the watering pot / And Fish with glittering tails"). The dawn increasingly bursts forth, the known strengthens, the unknown hardens into the day. It almost becomes dramatic - the scene abounds so much with the minor laws of challenge. (ОТТОГО: a strong blow of the wind, followed by the silence of a spleen). As when something sieves and, thus, it is not rain, nor is it ferrofluid (a gryphon in the world of materials: half liquid, half magnetic, an attractableness of the drops in a snowball), with its nails it attaches itself to the wall, turns into the orderliness of water (qui transtulit sustinet), into the conceitedness of the morning with the advantages of olive and lemon, with which everything is still all right.

* * *

(The System). Left to itself (abandoned to the boasting of shortness), each moment sinks into the multitude of others. So equal (the instants next to each other), they share the fate without jumping out from the carnival’s compactness, and yet they don’t terminate themselves inhumanly. In a choir, they hum up this and that, at least these do, the brittle hours between two Magellanic clouds (larger and smaller, the two galaxies closest to the Milky one), although they do that seldom, while those at a still greater distance don’t even do that. An instant (between the morning twilight and explicitness, rappel), necessary to, for this day too, unlock the collection of trophies, the medals for bravery (although such, close indispensability is not universal - to golf players, the critical issue is laid over the horizon). A moment of insignificance: neither the cause for hopelessness nor for equanimity - look how that bird collapses towards felicity! (What else could so gently shake this morning, not flooding it? Reconnaissance?). The cathedralic mechanism of cadence works reliably: it does not allow anything which is not fuzzy like casualness, brownish like adaptability, to divert the flow of thoughts. [In the case that they (the thoughts) dare to oppose the flow of things, in a worried tone a bulky error is pointed out to them, recte et suaviter]. On one side - system, on the other - vandalism. On the first - the Jesuitic tonnage of Calvinism [the charm of dogma of John Calvin (1509-1564), French Protestant reformer, the founder of the doctrines of predestination, particular redemption, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the certain perseverance of the saints], on the second - the insurrection of the polyglot, the stuck-out tongue of silence, the only which he speaks, ПЕСТРОТА at noon.

System [its impersonality, Philistinism (a mode of thinking in smugly narrow and conventional ways, lacking in and indifferent to cultural and aesthetic values - Webster's), the derivative of economy as derivativeness of life, qui facit per alium facit per se]: around its belly it overflows with rapture (quid rides?), full of unwillingly hidden scorn it shakes hands with ordonnant representatives from all over the world (quieta non movere), addresses the nation with the increasingly worsening vocabulary (qu’il soit comme il est desiré); a dispatcher: instead of the cabs it sends out the bombers with a Biblical load (qui non proficit, deficit), with the obsoleteness of everyday’s talk it supports the instruction about obsequious loyalty, by the whale’s apprehension of the world it frees itself from the small-minded examination, it trades kitsch for citizenship, it spies, checks, eavesdrops, flies over, dives, classifies, takes the right to first use a nuclear strike, prints, broadcasts, threatens, lies, invites the civilian stupidity and institutionary servility to the banquet at which, in a deep-felt manner canonized by capital, glorified by property, it greases itself with cookies of irremediable voidness - the shivering condensation of irreproachable simplification of the victory of the Devil’s apprentice, the form and image of the God’s servant. Propriétaire.

* * *

10/15-17/96

More and more convinced into the mechanical structure of the world (having discovered the abstraction of larva in the mahogany leg of a holiday table - ne fronti crede), one gets along with oneself better and better. (The ruinous construction of the origin, ОПАСНОСТЬ - he thinks that it is to do with that while, dining in front of the eddy-like fluency, he divides into today’s ingredients in dishes made of representative majolica). A great many theories pass through his head, but he slyly knows that none of them is right. ("...Light-violet medallion of a hawthorne flower, ready for kindness of a waltz plower...", there goes through his head, through the frivolity of the out-of-the-blue made verse, such a massiveness which, although rhymed, he immediately rejects). A careful computation of an organism (a winding road to the noiselessness in meandrous moves of a heron), the selection of the right material (beneath the layer of invigoration - the lance of doubt), finally - the very existence of the stand about something so unapproachable, lucrative like the madrigal rite of unscrupulous reasonableness (the liturgy of a rhomb), convinces him in the theory of a mechanism, of parts as the operators upon the wholeness, of experimental match (ОПЫТ), of total body of something which, strained, impudently abates behind a closed eye. ΠΡΟΣΕΧΕΤΕ! The harvest of the measurability, the logarithm of yellow (ΠΡΟΣΟΧΗ ΧΡΩΜΑ), the mannerism of high treason (η Γιουγκοσλαβια), everything which, at a given moment, is the most suitable to contemplate about - it speaks from him as from the wit of a hermit (ne Jupiter quidem omnibus placet), even though he hardly pulled out of there either. [To S.L., on the day before yesterday, for her 16-th birthday, all that was clear the 16-th time, transparent like СТАКАН (indeed, she bursts into laugh without that, anyway), while to him not even in this morning it became apparent, he didn’t make it yet from Marathon to Athens, to announce the victory over Persia, although he left on time, 490 B.C. (Nolo episcopari)]. Hence, he changes the tactics, buries the position under, throws the rifle made of words over the shoulder, but also levels it up [stacks them (the words) according to the degree of the congressional, that is, parliamentary buffoonery], exercises immobile maneuvers including the self-deceiving conversation with himself, relates dynamically to the idiosyncrasy (a physical composition, mental constitution) of a higher order, gets out at an unknown station having heard a shepherd’s song (nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit), postponing the mechanism of the lascivious sentimentality for tomorrow (nemo repente fuit turpissimus).

* * *

(The Temperance of the Bottom). Both that which is and that which is not clinged to each other’s eye-lashes: first visible then invisible part by part of irresistibility, first light- then dark-blue paysage of tincture, first modest then licentious lancer (first punctured then captivated by a lancet), first flashed then retreated to itself a complexity of Maritornes, a humpbacked, ugly inn servant in "Don Quixote", regarded by the knight as the beauteous daughter of the lord of the castle (in reality - the inn). All that which, inclined to jest, bristles all around (the paper, pen, watch and keys on the floor, the doubt stretched across the wall, scaramuccia - a buffoon in a motley dress, a stock character in an Italian comedy, depicted as a braggart and poltroon), and all that which, garlanded with laurel, dissipates in the center (a thought, a nice possibility in the thought, a pedagogically comprehended peace in the possibility) - they behave as on the exhibition: it is important that this ton of the pseudo-golden dust twinkles too. It means that here we are (as yesterday, as the day before it, de die in diem, as a sharp hit upon porose piano), on the fracture of substance as on the fingers of Jassanam, so long that that slender, South American (and Indian) bird walks too easily upon the fenny leaves, mist of significance, fragility of things, watching to not fall into dégagé.

On one side the reason, on another the pictures from nature: Medusa - one of the three Gorgoonis (along with Stheno and Euryale), whose head was cut off by Perseus and placed upon Minerva’s shield, and those who looked at it, and turned to stone. (There settles down the yew, shamelessly covers with nothing as with the full miss / Although on a doubtful, phosphorous road like the pistil on a lavender, it retires early, counts on bis). Decipimur specie recti. [We ask ourselves: to what side, as if they (the sides) are all not on one - ΚΙΝΔΥΝΟΣ (ΘΑΝΑΤΟΥ)]. The relief, door, hush: as when we open the empty suitcase - there looks at us the still eye of hardened time. (ΜΗ ΚΛΕΙΝΕΤΕ ΤΗΝ ΕΙΣΟΔΟ). From the relief there lurks the sensibility, the passableness of the door shuts with the slam, because of the hush there mists the world. (A sleight-of-hand artist is not at the rest in the libretto by the lyricist either - impermeable, he already blossoms, in the manner of a cursory lotus, ПОПЕРЕМЕННО).

Wherever we go we carry a metre of verse - the scepter of forged preciousness which, melodramatically (poorly advised), we derived from the modern memory, moderate in mysteriousness, sweetened in myrtle under panoramic balcony, in the effusion of oxidation upon the picturesqueness of the bottom, de haut en bas, dei gratia.

* * *

Every word takes care of itself: with the others it doesn’t have anything to do until, being either tricked or forced, it is shouldered into them by weakness or ambiguity. Se jeter dans l’eau de peur de la pluie. As long as it is left to itself (on the table, in the garden, at the last attempt to rise into alt), it is healthy but, at the same time, separated from other words (which, in spite of that, anatomically lined-up in the shut mouth, patiently wait for it, hoping for a great, communal moment, sotto voce), to its singular meaning it heedfully hides the crack, similarly to the ruined aristocracy carefully bent over the obsolete heraldry. And when at last (each such word) succumbs to the temptation, and gets into the circle with those which deceive it or indeed count on it, something breaks off such a word in a bird way (its actual, until then hidden content - aurora borealis of the South: aurora australis) - so damaged, it lets itself to the collective phrase, a banal description or scream, surgit amari aliquid. Once caught in the sentence (proclamation, metaphor), it gets lost in the multitude of Indo-European (ВЫВЕСКА) or other symbols (¥Б♠◦ЪЮЋδ◊ж░). Together, the words/symbols which, until a moment ago, took care of themselves, now (sewn in the everyday conversation, journalistic vacuousness or electromagnetic modulation of the, so-called, media) epitomize the tidiness/assiduousness of a servitude, not anymore representing anything from the original, by the risky solitariness vacillated pith. Suum cuique.

* * *

10/18/96

It’s quieting down instead of blazing up, this morning too. (In the morning, we expect a development, not what’s done, СТОП).

(On this day also, 22 years ago, you arrived in the evening - at this, morning twilight hour, I was all in planning, worked the dough, no cake, like now, framed me by the window - η παστα).

(Where did that picture of day break go, when it was possible to sniff puma at the very beginning?).

Perhaps, we do not exult ourselves enough - but where to find an unpulverized instant? Everything goes its own way - it is said meaning a surrender. (No fear is disturbed, exempla sunt odiosa).

It’s 6:16 and yet everything is known since the first glare. (The minutes and hours serve here for a diagonal amusement, for the side mirror image 91:9, ex mero motu).

In the distance, a thundering fire truck became (at the same moment) an object of oblivion, while on seminars it is claimed that that, too, is explainable. Ex pede Herculem. (Only, it is unknown what vertebra the vehicle disappeared by, there admit the seminarists).

Different are the views, the schools of thought too, many are satisfied with the learned. Even the specialists show seriousness when generalizing. [Otherwise worthy of praise in what he’s doing the best, И.Р.Щафаревйч, in "On Certain Tendencies in the Development of Mathematics", a rather poor English translation (1975) of the work originally published in 1973 in both Russian and German in the Jahrbuch der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Götingen, pp.37-42, meddles desirability into purpose, fulfillment into disrepair, algorithm into deliverance, relaxation into metaphysics - he addresses the reason as one would his friend (or rather as when, in palanka, waiting for a guest from a metropolis, or when one, in a formic manner, puts oneself below a dog’s resurrection), he slaps on the unceasingness of afternoon by walking in a circle, to the Lord of mercy and love, distanced by π, he draws near by 3.14, the miss to the full hit (0.00159...) he attributes to the impatience/approximativeness of G.W.F.Hegel’s (from the same text) "idiotic infinity", until "in the harmony of numbers" he completes the "path towards unifying with the Deity" - as if the God would care about math after (this) result! Deus avertat!].

And that all lasts, interlaces, grows until (this morning too) it withdraws before something simple (full only of a radial complexity), mildly yellowish (which is the heaviest found in morass birds), before vertigo in the memento which, in such moments, like a healed superior lung lobe, cures itself with the alternating periods of doubt and hope, orderly setting everything to its place, carving it into the firm face of untenable essence by the discreet buzzing of a grandiose cover above the things full of empty contents but without the pseudonym of the heretic, carousal of the mob, or pliability of the recorder.

Abstraction and Passion

10/19/96

The majority of these writings are abstract: they neither describe something actual (except each of these days), nor produce a concrete conclusion (except about nonsense and sense). This is so because passionateness can only be neutralized by abstractness. [Euhemerus, that is euhemerism (a Greek philosopher of the 4^th century B.C., that is his doctrine), quieted the ardor of deified dead heroes by abstracting the protagonists of the polytheistic mythology: the myths founded on traditional accounts of real people and events thus transited from the neon signs of cowardice and bravery to the desk lamp above the empty chronicle of the lone man, from where they drip into the abstract].

Photons of silence as a picturesque invasion of deaf hour. Chi tace confessa.

For, it is not true that these writings are hermetic (although they may look like it) - they’re only suitably disguised to withstand the flood of the, so-called, solutions. For instance, (on the surface) there mists a fine (at that, as a rule, it is habitually added ‘dull’), in any case - a persistent rain, but, in fact, deep in the drops there reside (hydrostatic/hydrodynamic?) forces which we unsuccessfully cross the spears with. C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre. It’s Saturday (which one in order?), and yet it feels as if it was yesterday when all these days came for their belongings. [Since then, merely a suspicion (towards them, the days) has been replaced by the extreme disbelief: why would one think that it is not a false charm which constitutes an obstacle?]. Neither we trust them (the days), nor do they show an interest in us - a relationship that can only be dreamed of, is in the making. (That is why the nights netted over our vigils - only, aren’t they going to make them too bitter?).

There exists not a culprit (executor), nor is there a passive observer (innocent spectator): together, everything rolls (an azure quoit of bottom from a bluish catalogue of peak) through a star’s tail to an astronaut’s jaws. [What on that road, besides war losses, is used for the sign-post - neither the coachman (Sculptor) nor the archer (Archer) knows]. Having flashed here and there, in partial obscurity we still find the decisiveness - even in a deaf hour something stimulates us for the chameleon treat. All which exists could easily be cancelled (as, to a great many, it happens daily) with no difference whatsoever (although those to whom it happened know that the best) - but, then, who would be in conspiracy with one side of the sky at night, and with the other during day? Replacing each other (alternating in a correctly smothered fever), the night shuns the day, presenting that as a service to it: in some sort of occupancy with consistence, these two dominant states of rotation (the others being cut into increasingly tilted slices) have as their task to not melt in the dawn chrysolite [a deep yellowish green transparent olivine, a complex silicate of magnesium and iron (Mg,Fe)₂SiO₄, used as a topaz gem for correct gratification], nor freeze in the moderate evening (a capsule full of the cold ash). Day and night, that is (but mostly in between, when it neither cools nor boils), there constantly is imposed an impression of the abstraction of passion, of which all our novels are made, with always the same fable and no moral of the story. Entremets.

The Deep Red and Fickleness

10/20/96

Persistent leaves, vine, Vitis, not the marine but a land Zostera marina, conscientiously spread over the brick wall when looking to the left through the kitchen window, suddenly (due to impatience - the gradualness slipped out of our hands long ago) settled down into the deep red, due to the congealedness almost Burgundy, with an expected extent of (that is, not emphasized) climbing through the harmlessness of meaning, charitableness of piety, onto the olive-greenness of the descent.

As if exactly on this anniversary of the liberation of B. [in which, 52 years ago, my parents took part as well (since then transposed beyond the target of that, more picturesque, and other, more boring attacks)], this whole side of the wall (copper-plated by the aslant glow) stresses itself in the deep red quality ΚΑΒΑ ΠΟΤΑ, in the bindingness between the past (urban) event and bicarbonate captivation of the self-propelled plant (a catalogued artery of a universal root), by the metamorphosis from the deceiving of a bright green to the devotion of the deep red. [ΠΑΗΤΕΡΑ: invasion to the felis of age, incapacity to pliably jump out (of time)]. And since the city changed (is changing) to one, and the symbolic plant to the other side - every October, when it is most necessary, the latter is more deeper (like now) in the colour which it represents, while the former is increasingly paler (in the same colour). While the leaves coagulate into a darker and darker red, in the place over there the colours are increasingly light and untrustworthy, including the most deceitful one - reddish. While the (anticipated) column from the plant strides like one over the bricks into the firmness of the deep red, in the city down there over such a large inconstancy it is crossed as over touching adaptability, the skipping is approved more than it would be to a squirrel. ("The managers of the bank at Genoa have been represented as a second kind of senate", Addison). Vive ut vivas. (Here, around the building, a squirrel finds everything it needs for today, over there it wouldn’t be able to find even patheticalness). Vivere est cogitare.

Of course, B. is not an exemption - it is only, in this comparing morning, under a greater attention of the (otherwise) botanical scrutinizer (sprinkled, truth to say, with the freckles of a boa): from the air, still (all the time), there hangs the sandy simpleness of sense (there sniff the florid liberators of passion); only this crawler (vinea) turned into the dark red flower. As if the old truth of linking through space and time so different forms (as of essence there is nothing) is being confirmed: before our eyes there joins the War Cycle (1912-1915) of Надежда Петровић (1873-1915) [a painter and hero, the woman who, on October 12, 1908, to the foreign, Austrian invader, replied by accepting the challenge until "winning by force that which has been grabbed", or until the "proud and glorious death"] with the advance of the liberators’ tank across the ruins of Славија, more than a half a century ago, along the (caterpillar’s) deep red trace of the Fifth (K.) Brigade into which, at this moment, the entire machine with the imaginary crew of now quiet warriors, uniformed with a tincture of Rosa, finally dripped with composure, as into a voyage around coalesced fame, ЗАМОК consisting of a flag and wind, uberrima fides.

* * *

10/21-25/96

(The Picture and the Frame). Overwhelmed (in this corner) with practically nothing, I’m looking at its (the nothing’s) tissue. [Evasive rather than direct, the identicalness of nothing does not give in easily. It fades behind the wall or goes under demagogical consolation - presents an apple of dissension (stirs up the discontent) between the consistence and contradiction: КАНАТ or το ψαλιδι].

Before the mellow years of silence there jumped out (like a pupil) an incessant humming asking them (the years) for advice. Why is it hardly audible in the kitchen and foyer while here, around the support beam, it’s quite present? [It must be that it is produced by some malfunction in the room. And if it (the room) is empty, sure that one better doesn’t deal with its persistence. Ultra licitum].

Besides the two, that is one thing (the buzzing of nothing, ultra vires), not much is heard in the last half hour. (It, maybe, counts with the weariness of the, so pastel, tandem assembly, waits for a discreet (or direct) assent to announce itself too. That sort of shift happens fairly often!)

There it is heard, therefore, the netting pulse of a paraffin hour. (As when a deserted desire is crumbling). ΗΣΥΧΙΑ.

Getting up from their beds orderly, the tenants in the building lose their consideration - they make increasingly louder noise. (It is mainly water which is used, omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis).

There is nobody on the street - officially it isn’t dawn. {Sun rises in the next ( )[( )^-1] of the time it took to wait so far: where else [in the manner of olive oil spilled over high seas (unter vier Augen), the official contents of inflexion, bordered with habitualness of custom] is a more yellow order made?}.

It means, half an hour until present, plus half an hour from now on - and everything will be comprehended. НЫНЕ. (Yet, what are we going to do with transmutability of the placid night into the formality of the document about the derangement of a double verse? Un cabello hace sombra).

However, one should better get ready for once (get dressed, take the destiny in the same way as the scarf into the hands, place contingency in front of the completed act) and leave for work. (To step out of pagoda, to shake out of it).

There’s nothing from the sterile research upon the corners of the apartment, regardless of how much rigorousness hides behind the design plaster on the ceiling. One should hope that this day, too, will set everything to its place (the cigarette smoke to tabagie), even if it doesn’t succeed in it because of the vindicated suspicion of only one frame for the entire picture.

* * *

(The Investigation). Down the dark street, together there pass by a person (his spirit - non quis, sed quid), a learnedness, and a cat (the faithful shadow of the moonlight). Non multa, sed multum. ("Unpitied and unheard, where misery moans", Thomson). The cat got wet to the skin (the rain is one of those quiet and persistent throwings off from the throne, unbreakable even in falling backwards), the person on his shoulders carries a backpack (he must be a schoolboy, that is a college ctudent, maybe a librarian (ΗΜΕΡΟΜΗΝΙΑ ΛΗΞΕΩΣ), the learnedness hesitates: it hides even that little of declivity which suddenly (thoughtlessly) came in its sight, deciphering its chronical poorness. (Lavandula vera behind glasses of heresy).

("Wings the blue element, and borne sublime", Rogers).

If it weren’t for the dark (wet) morning twilight, these (three) parts of one mystery (the undoubted existence of mobilization, directory for the headquarters) would show themselves more clearly, at the first step already - this way they scatter the empty story (they call for an investigation). Malentendu. [In case of a more sudden occurrence, the same parts of the beginning (the fragments of the morning, ПОЗВОНОК, locus sigilli) would impress themselves into investigator’s memory as something bizarre but equal with other possibilities (the eventual results) of investigating the secluded properties of trinity. Nemo solus sapit].

Such an investigation reduces to writing down every detail shamelessly, walling in from the absurd but also being flexible, staying at the level of a modest preoccupation of a small place (the Palanka and its, according to Радомир Константиновић, philosophy), and yet maintaining the receptiveness for other (possibly more suspicious) claims about the purpose of a metropolis (its, according to G. Gershwin, American in Paris). Investigation - a skilled system of anarchy, wherein it is unknown what is the cause and what the effect, and whether it (itself) behaves favourably to the public’s well-being, acting with a dose of a sweet disarrangement or a state loveliness and charm. Ita lex scripta. Until the person [there he is, pulsating (nosce te ipsum) he disappears beyond the slope of the street in question, pressed by the described learnedness but, at the other hand, softened by the stepping of the persistent cat proportional to the role of a black tiger (in utramque fortunam paratus)] decides to fully submit himself to the inquiry, although not allowing its results to endanger his climbing atop the sense (in vacuo), even if it’s to do with such a prosaic company - a cat and learnedness (nugæ canoræ), presented for the purposes of masking the investigation about the participation of a lone man in an angular setting of a scene of inaccessibility, full of the light walk of a crown witness of relative truth about the absolute fulfillment of obvious things.

* * *

By opening the second window as well, nothing is solved in haste: it takes long before the air starts flowing through the room - there slows it the disbelief caused by the insolent disturbance of the status quo, the gravitation of radiation, АСТМА. (Perhaps I’m not careful, I deliberate). Still, the window which I usually (routinely) open, tidy waits for the second one - after the initial distrust, they start to breathe each other via their quadrangular lungs. (Everything of theirs went to that, the pneumatics; the frame serves them to breathe, although we think that we look through that square safely). (Ο πνευμονας - the roof of straw, hay, the walls in the oxygen).

Circulating from one window to the other, it looks like something is going to touch down but it doesn’t, it dispossesses itself from the other persisting on this road (it quiets in the enticing dismemberment of Azrael, the angel of death in Jewish and Mohammedan records) - it dines while promising itself to the emerald didacticism of Auster, God of the south wind. There establishes itself a passage between the outside and inside (someone’s last breath slides down sparingly, as if it’s his last possession). First cautiously, then uniformly: a compassion rolls over its head. (While one window breathes in, the other breathes out, and vice versa). Like a domesticated, mild beast (a familiar feeling of service) - between the two windows the air is bearing itself. Having got a chance, it uses it to the end. (Aurora, the Goddess of the dawn, cuts from East to West, not stopping even at noon - there is always morning somewhere). It disafforests the (although empty, full only of itself) way, but also makes new paths - it draws in the nostrils of the wall. (A little bit longer and the entire premises will be bathing in it. Froides mains, chaud amour). Dissonant at the end, the flow started more harmlessly, with the two-syllabic gesture (by opening the second window, too). Front à front.

(What would have happened with this room if a more drastic move was made, when it drunk its fill of air in only a minute or two? Furor arma ministrat).

Such a negligible circulation (and such a large disturbance of, until a moment ago, a perfect regularity) can only be explained by something inner, construction-like, a concept of fixed residing between the windows in the walls made of the air flow caused by inattentiveness of their opening into an ephemeral (short-lived) dusk, the ambiguous fullness of the spirits/persons invisible through one and visible through the other of the two passages into the same.

* * *

The incorrigibility threatens to become a habit - so strong is the endurance of fate (there notices the one who this is about). He contemplates about how this doesn’t go anywhere, right after which he himself enters the granular photography of the world (adds to it his grain, το κυμα).

Once he talked to himself - not anymore, at least not enthusiastically. (There, too, he put himself in the prospective: he doesn’t waste the words on himself). He looks back at the room even though its arrangement no longer looks to him as rinsed and insensible - it rather resembles the exposedness of a steadfast solidity, a picturesque paving of inexorableness, amour propre. He increasingly finds it difficult to make up his mind in favour of a new change (even from worse to better). If it could be delivered to him in a written form, so that he’d be spared from participating - that would be bearable and justifiable, he thinks. [During that time, full of the ceremony of destination, a train which he described earlier, gets again through his window (95dB 105dB), filled with the rationality of a result in the cars of intelligibleness]. ("The day begins to break and night is fled; Whose pitchy mantle overveil’d the earth", W. Shak.). (This questioning of the style taught him at least something - he hopes while leaving for the bordering harmony, РАЗ). He weighs pros and cons, feverishly circles around them (dividing them into suspicious and true ones), analyzes his (as it is duly said) life journey - while (actually) retreating to the sticky concurrence of events. He would neither stay nor go: he sifts the words through his fingers into the bag (outside of the building) half full of leaves, adding to them the parts of the unorthodox sojourn with a dignity of disappearance in spite of the early appearance of the collectors of reason. Today is their day: they take the fallen leaves up into the height, the days burnt while expecting miracle they shape by a hydraulic tool of the volume of a cube, demonstrating their resoluteness by the inevitability of change, steadily and diligently (æquabiliter et diligenter).

* * *

(Dream - 5). I know that I woke up at two o’clock (I looked at my watch then, at three thirty, and at five before five, every time falling asleep again), that I got up at ten past five (when I usually get up), but I only remember the last dream (the lasting fifteen minutes) even though, as it is seen (and as it was expected), there happened significantly more, à pas de géant. Having arrived, therefore, by the experimental airplane to the faultless land of egalitarian manifesto (Epiphaneia, τα θεοφανεια), and starting to go towards the white room at the fourth floor in the way in which one goes to the jaws of a hotel exposed to the sun (a vostra salute, à votre santé, a vuestra salud) and, not having stepped into it but rather having walked down to the lobby and having got into the bus dispatched towards something important (ПОЗЫВ), but disappeared by the overpass already, having thus found myself on the road full of utility vehicles in front of which the indulgence was hastily moving away, including the leaps of a countryman, his wife and their child into the attacks of talking in our (Serbian) language about something which I pretended I didn’t understand (ειναι επικινδυνο?) even though it occupied a whole magazine left for a laid-back perusal until the passing of a neatly kept passenger train of six cars, glassed on their right side with the windows of approval according to which the speed was maintained low, almost modest, and entering the last station of the train consisting, therefore, of the sleeping cars made by ГОША furnished by the metal-frame beds, military blankets and cotton pillows, at the time for the awakening of the sleepers some of which were men, some women, in various phases of their lives in which they rubbed their eyes full of the proof that there is nothing of the sleeping during referencing the serious things visible through the window of the last car in the form of a child’s room with enlarged toys for the ultimate size of a giant (consule Planco): the bear-like doggie, the elephant-like kitty, the golden-bearing state of reasonable behaviour of that which in the subject car finds itself as a youngster whose speech (НРАВ) is unintelligible although it fits a bagatelle in the sense of a twitch of an archer on the scene of embroidery of tidiness of grown up participants of the expedition sent into the broken time for a possible help (aide toi, et le ciel t’aidera), a grammatical tranquility of the series of pictures from five minutes to five to ten minutes past five.

* * *

11/04-07/96

(From November to November). So imperceptibly in November (with one foot in October): as if we’re looking for an excuse to continue everything from where it stopped (Sch’dy-Annapolis-Wash.D.C.-Sch’dy). (Yet, if it would round off into unavoidability, a marine deposal of the Atlantic link, an ordered НОВОСТЬ, we wish).

Such an immense, but indistinct daybreak. There can be seen its betterment, but not perfection. It’s getting ready for a swing, folding over the wild geese. (To tame them - it cannot; to drill their forehead - it installs itself on the flock’s summit).

This is the month from which, a year ago, everything started to dissolve to the bottom. [On it - the trained ingredients of impartiality feed the wary, colourless garden (of expired marigold), removing the signs of studiousness, ΜΗΝ ΠΑΤΑΤΕ ΤΟ ΠΡΑΣΙΝΟ].

Scrupulous mornings like this one do not let anything to chance. They admonish about anything, entangle in the bone of the whole thing. (It is only themselves who they don’t let to their own incurability).

November is always so unpretending: it counts on a hidden significance. Gradus ad Parnassum.

It calms impetuosity, covers the stagger, as if it is to do with passages through everlasting trimness. (The only thing which, in all of that, is eternal, during that time mindfully falls off). Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Having accidentally left from this month to the others (without having touched any one of them more than a perilous pricking does), after the whole circle here we are, back in it: everything is as before, only doubt increased, all the way to the sanableness of an acrimonious clutch.

Perhaps, everything should have been soothed - hurdled like an excuse in front of the agile leap of judgment, directed along an isobare (the line of equal pressure), used as tackiness and pathos (homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto).

And yet, if all of this didn’t burst in the flames from November to November, nobody would have been brought into the situation to part with us in a listless manner of enviously kept (not easily gained) prosperity of the circle (gradu diverso, via una) - the mountain-spur of orthodoxy of tranquil supposition of unbearable gilding in the sign of the otter.

* * *

Such a well-known road between the two places (Sch’dy, Wat.) causes question (falls into wonder): how come I do not get from one place to the other in an instant? On the contrary, it takes me seven to eight hours of fast driving, without stopping, in one direction. What’s more, a year and a half ago, in a period of a few months, I was fined three times because of speeding. (Οριο ταχυτητας as a moving target).

(Distance always bars, as the last reprimand to impertinence).

("Huge hips of slain around the body rise", Dryden).

Thinking about the, so-called, expertise in something, finding our own shadow in the universal reflection of a successfully imagined picture of a truthful place, aristocratic situation, or patrician tree - we behave impatiently, too pluckily (clamorously) announcing the singularity of doubleness, in loco parentis.

Doubleness: nothing is as when it was left to re-examine itself during our absence - looking at it, we cross over the deficiency in such a way so as to neglect it, almost forgiving it. Grosse tête et peu de sens.

Every place in which he was, he pulls behind him until he (its portrayer) forgets it. And when, in spite of the eagerness, he fails to remember it, the pages slip out of his hands, bending over because of the dust (ПРАХ), making themselves drunk from its deposit.

What is left for him is to retreat from this place too (to throw the dwelling coronet down the Mohawk river), to steal out on fingers before the flattering words, to go to something more reasonable and milder (to the house demolished by war, adapted for the judicious homeless).

With such a move he would get rid of the duplicity, making a contract with the endurance of both places (in question), settling into the same, original point - a phosphorous equivalent of the failed confidence in a greater voyage: gnothi seauton.

* * *

The Indescribable: Even the indescribable is in wonder - it’s indescribable, and yet faultless! (Otherwise, it would comfort itself with an opportunity - describable, represented as РАЗРЫТЬ).

It (the indescribable) is made heavier by the status of a saint, covered with the lightness of a sinner, with an olive (η ελια) in degree of a powder.

(Melodiousness of Mars - planetary unsolvableness by Gustav Holst).

It (the indescribable) is dug in the eyes of a dog by euthanasia of the pet (Max, ‘The kindest wish of my friends is euthanasia’, Arbuthnot), by the act of an easy departure with the wind.

"Winter, oft, at eve resumes the breeze", Thomson.

Whatever side to take (in whatever direction to go) - the costumed fondness is being imposed upon it (the indescribable), instead of the naked truth.

The increasingly paler colour of the sky admonishes it about the conceptual constant. (Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret).

The morning, that’s a fact, establishes before it as well, but also restrains in front of such possibilities, each one of which is a true little exultancy with nothing bigger than this at the present. Even at the formative end it is indescribable: armful, and yet it falsely clears up through the piano work of Malebolge, the eighth circle of punishment in Dante’s construction of Inferno, containing ten bolgi or pits (lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate).

Taking part in the degradation (entropy) of a dynamical system in which the activities before banality take a bath under favourable light [the current relation between people and automobiles, the cursive adage of the lights in the kitchens of incurable passion (mauvaise honte and mauvais gout), the accelerated courteousness of a greyhound, a bird as a drilling-ground of wings] - the indescribable cannot retreat without leaving an incomplete impression during the describing.

* * *

(Whim and Wonder). Having easily scorned that part of the life, we’re filling ourselves with its doom. (All which, in a choir, set fire to itself there, completed in a solo stake here). Having become rough, from one we fall into the next incautiousness. (Omne solum forti patria).

Light-mindedly eradicating (the highest form of zeal) the possibility there, we exculpate the assiduousness here. Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast. (And what are we going to do with the pillaging attack of the words?).

We ponder over a new solution using the old craftiness - surrender (as if it is not real, olet lucernam). We let nothing out of our sight (the least we let is the frailness of a greenhouse, with its roof cut off from Hyades, the daughters of Atlas, placed in the sky as a cluster of the stars of Taurus, to indicate the approach of rainy weather when they rise with the sun). In order to circumvent such a defined sensibility of rubber (flexibility of a tiger), to skip it or, in some other way, to make it levelheaded, the years of devoted care are needed which, however, passed by so laboriously.

Having run away from everything, we came only here, into the symmetry of the walls as into the theory of dwelling, into the area of the room as the integral of the voyage, МОЗГ). Here - we wrestle with the loneliness (Γεια σας), there - we loathed the crowd (Αντιο). ("The hypochondriac, melancholy complexion of us islanders", Berkeley, at which, here, it is understood that the island is represented by the room).

In either one or the other case, the confrontation with the temperate step of vehemence realizes itself equally culpably, it grows as the earlier described flower growing from Hyacinthus, a youth accidentally slain by Apollo throwing his discus, so the latter caused the flower to bear the letters AI AI (see Glossary).

There - in the acquaintances’ sureness, here - in the (unsure) acquaintance with the self. (Omen faustum).

That which we left, we excessively punished by our own whim - like a spider on the other web, we wonder too late, as it is breaking from the same wind.

* * *

11/08-10/96

(The Ghosts). On the front surface of the wooden door (similar to the one in the previous apartment), something straightens its back (bridles up, as heavily). ПОМЕХА. Two creatures are there, worked out in the same (sudden) way from the wooden board, and there, at the door surface, left in a permanent association: facing each other, the larger one shows its back, right leg and hand (its hair covering everything else); the lesser one is also less clear, (startled aback) it looks over the larger one as if conducting conversation with a favourite mountain (submitting itself like a chamois, parfaitement bien) - that would be an approximate description of how they look, ПОПЕРЕК. The lack of a picture of continuing watchfulness in the empty dwelling makes one, whether he wants it or not, to dive onto this door, 3 metres away, onto the scene in the flattened wood distanced somehow less: on the surface of the wooden door, like on the break of the lining of a seasonal coat, the steadiness (fragmented into the questions without answers) retreats to a deserved rest, par ci par là. In the tissue (fabric, the battle-field of fixation) beyond the contiguous line (of the carpenter’s repentance), the two creatures stiffen in the described way, their unwavering thought succeeding only, for the panic one there is neither time nor room, omnia ad Dei gloriam. Two worlds in collision: the checking of the correlation, point of connection, and endurance of the channel, is performed by scratching upon the gloss - γρατσουνιζω (this door, too, is coated with the same, enduring lacquer, omnia bona bonis). And that is how there can be heard the little agitation of a formalism (omnia vincit labor), the indulgent creaking of imagined means for the calming down which transits into the porosity of a smear over the cellular ramification of the creatures of portrayed peculiarities, naturally induced by the appearance of the same spirits, in another dwelling.

* * *

(Expecting A Tornado). The dramatics of the sky confirms the rule according to which for every knoll a show is set up, a vehemence is computed, the degree of dissension is measured, and the conduit of lightning is determined. This may also look like a reluctant assent to a power sharing: at about 10 to 15 miles in a straight line towards the Appalachian-astrakhan, mountainous fur (only more orange-like, as if leaving for a cultivated area in the south), something mild is faintly seen over the tamed hills - the warm wind keeps on biting off their pinnacle without the concussion of the mizzenmast of Argo, the ship in which Jason and his brave companions sailed to bring back the golden fleece from Colchis, only to return empty to their true place, between the Great Dog and Southern Cross. There came two or three stormy days - and still a tornado is being awaited for, ПЕХОТА from above. Even though in this area it is rare, to the warm wind from the south (it’s always that one which shows up like the last rescue) the collision with the north wind would mean a lot - a sharp occurrence of a tornado (the result of the clash) is being forecasted so that one more rule would be proved by the exemption. [Upon the little golden spoon, used for accumulating the lye of the contemporary minutes (while pretending to stir the tea), there collected the rust of indogen, a complex radical C₈H₅NO, the basic ingredient of the indigo of the days: such an immense sameness and yet this, last hour for a difference]. Expecting a tornado, the things are being over-dramatized (here in particular): there fight each other the sirens from police cars and fire trucks (ΑΣΤΥΝΟΜΙΑ as a reservoir η πυροσβεστικη υπηρεσiα), the haste is presented larger than it should be. Jeu de théâtre. (Preparations for a local festivity are underway - an uninformed traveler through this place would say, not comprehending much of the hubbub and commotion, imagining how, perhaps, it is a question of Indo-Hittite, a hypothetical language from which, according to the newest studies, there evolved an Indo-European language on one side, and Hittite, hieroglyphic Hittite and Luwian language on the other). To the surface there rises a passion made turbid, there clear up the contours (while the balance collapses) of the antagonized forces caught in action (there blow onto each other the North and the South). As if a promised hour arrived - the rapture with the air (like with the self) is increasingly visible (is only left), the fearfulness (before the oncoming tornado) shows itself as undeserving for such a flattering opportunity of the valiant act. At last, the partakers from beneath are going to, with their bare hands, come to quarters with the phenomenon worthy of the fighting - for the dull, rainy days, there will be left only a word or two of an excuse, lapsus linguæ. Everything will be done to arrive to a volatile end, to premediated vengeance to the excruciatingly incessant, immovable same, until it (the same, along with them, the participants in the abrupt current of pompousness) is turned on the other side by the old slumber, lapsus calami.

* * *

(Taco Bell). It’s about the "fast food chain". At that, of course, it is unsavory to give any comment, be it positive or negative, about that sort of thing. By merely mentioning it, everything is said, neither good nor bad, neither supportive nor obstructive, neither for nor against it - by its very existence, its whole notion belongs equally to all the others (more or less fleeting) registrations of conscience and (for the hungry and used to that kind of food) of the stomach. Age quod agis. Yet (and that is where its cursory vindication is suspected), this chain, Taco Bell, is less visited and by so much more comodious than those more beloved ones, so that if one (in passing) has to drop by one of them (they’re always in a multitude, next to each other, lurking together, collectively they plasticize the focal street which, because of that, is named Main St., or State St., or 75^th St.), somehow it is the best to get into it (T.B.) - if nothing else, the carte du jour entries are less clear: as if they bashfully offer some of the, although efficiently that is sleekly rinsed, Latino easiness on the ear, a prima vista. I usually have a ‘Taco Supreme’(!) - together with a coffee, it costs me $2.00 (a transaction worthy of an investment, besides being proof of its candor) - I would feel uncomfortable sitting there without ordering something, the personnel and their boss [a foppishly polished, effervescent chief - humanum est errare (hominis est errare)] could deem that I cannot afford even that; besides - I am going to drop by next time again. (I come there every two or three months, to wait for an hour or however long it takes for an oil change in a nearby car dealership service). And so, having entered T.B., that is, having passed by, with the corresponding derision, its competitors (M.D., B.K., and P.H.), I sit down in the same corner (one has such a propensity - he identifies with the past pluckiness, by now the experience), I look at the room, it normally is almost empty (sometimes it is only me inside), although, if it is close to lunch hour, it may bustle, through the window I usually see more customers outside, waiting in their cars by the pick-up window, from where they quickly take their orders away, solving the worry for the day. (These people don’t even have time to sit down, or they’re not after sitting inside, in any case their food is twice as fast). But, as always, all of that is secondary and, as it already was said, to characterize or to develop any theory about it (the "chain") is superfluous because we all reached the point which we did, and if we don’t like something, nothing remains except our reticent ruling not to take a part in it. (In the same way in which, the other day, the majority of this country’s population eligible for voting did not cast their ballots during the election). The word here is, therefore, not about an evaluation or categorization of Taco Bell (another machine, or the unconvincing exemption in the sea of the similar ones), but about the quintessence of this, radial corner (in which, as I’ve already said, I sit when I’m here), in one of so many shanks of the essence. [Of course, and as in the case of a hydra/octopus, those legs, together with the competitors’, extend upon the other, mud-spattered bottom, where we dive searching for something all the time (hiatus valde defiendus), never making a catch]. In the corner, therefore, set are a table and a chair (made of plastic but painstakingly wiped off), there is a window behind me and another one on my left: hôtel garni. From the ceiling-mounted speaker (like from a radiogram of stupor) something plays, sings, that is advertises a harmonic existence of purpose (indeed, it is not clear what the benefits and aspirations of all these radio stations are), also up there (on the ceiling), a fan spins, converting Hertz-es to revolutions per minute, running neither late not fast into its, mechanical vortex. Having finished my meal and drink and, thus, having justified my presence here, I can wait for the hour to expire soothingly, I surmise. Hic et nunc. Even, with a bit more imagination, I can identify with the pastime, elatedly trimmed down to an unceremonious ordinariness, or at least (and finally) to nothing important. (Horresco referens). For now, everything goes on predictably (into situations like this one, there can fly the deranged ones, shooting the choked patrons and appalled personnel), the bliss of the lull is undisturbed, as it is the mumble of the normalized conversation of a few customers, the whole thing is both let and not let to chance [it is let when a person is full (hors de combat), and it is not let while he/she still eats - looking around distrustfully (hors de la loi)], and even if, along with the unvarying ticking of purposefulness, there leaves its sediment the shortage of some higher meaning - who else is, especially here and now, after it? (Η φραση!). ("Demoniac phrensy, moping melancholy", Milton). And although it looks like it is fully in order (and it certainly is), the deep calm is probably a result of a bigger shake, of a disturbance somewhere else [Slavdom (Slavs collectively) is a possible example, СРЫВ, hors de concours], the only thing which never changes is the mean value of presence and absence (having almost fallen asleep, I supposed), lastly, maybe sitting here I’m actually not sitting here but swinging in heaven (hors de saison), that is, avoiding hell (hors d’œuvre), regardless of how drastic this may sound, or seem as an overstatement about such an envisaged life: on the exterior full of tractate about devotedness to the trade of feeding as swift as lightning, in the interior full of the festivity of red jasmine above the condition of hunger.

The Anniversary

11/11-13/96

It’s this chronicle’s anniversary - and yet everything flew in the old way until as recently as yesterday. ПЕРЕСПАТЬ. [If this morning’s impetuosity continues (ΣΥΝΕΧΗΕ ΠΑΡΑΣΤΑΣΗ) there will almost be no reason for marking a lone man’s lavishness. What is that which is to be marked out when objects are not discernible by more than a suspicious change? A capite ad calcem].

Time puts everything in its place - it is said. But where did it place the uniformity of conclusion? Ad referendum? How can something, which behaved too nicely towards the void (hitherto glistening white in it, alere flammam), stand out, be noticed and, after all, denoted? The propensity toward denoting originates from the parts of soul gathered by gleaning: they hope to unite on the right date. (ПРОК). With every wrestling move still at distance, we breathe orderly (in short sighs), saving the full capacity for the breaking moment. We establish that it is the one which marks (rounds off) a period from a particular day in one year to the same day in the other. As if all the other days before, between, and after, have nothing to do with that.

Passion for marking, however full of necessary symbolism, in its foundation is, thus, full of error, ПРОКАЗА. The leveled days, early mornings, untorn nights (and breakable dusks) are too familiar with what is proclaimed to be some beginning and scale, to be able to expect any miracle from them. Neither anything is denoted by them nor is it measured - except a line of normative length. Alter idem.

But, if we passed over them (the anniversaries, a die) in silence, if we didn’t mark them (giving way to that kind of inspiration, τωρα), we would have not subjugated ourselves to the sanability of thoroughgoing melancholy of attention, the result-based snugness of yearly mentioning of that which, for nineteen years, parent-like as a mother, is missing, year after year submitted to the fluency of the cycle of the things there.

* * *

(Interim). It’s 6:03, a usual tenant at his usual time leaves for work - I do not have to look at that, it’s enough to anticipate it (through the window on the right, made foggy by the gloom and persistence, НАСЫПЬ). Chacun tire de son coté. There cannot be anything else, I’m convincing myself, noticing how similarity is laying in ambush at each step (today, again, there is no difference relative to yesterday); ΑΝΑΚΟΙΝΩΣΗ: I may, perhaps, stack two or three books (put them back in their place!), then do the same with the scattered papers, НАСЫПАТЬ, also with the support to the incarcerated state of invisible vessels (with their habit of stuffing), with the contenance tumbled (down the roof of the house across the street) into the increasingly pale lawn (if it, too, disappears - there will be nothing to mow in the summer). Such intense disturbances and such little noise (as if only maxilla, the upper jaw, works, while the bottom teeth wait), even the prevailing thinking is not heard in spite of that one was so much counting with the difference of opinions (and one of them winning). [Con dolore: is it possible that the end result is always (more exactly: unmistakably) sad, or is it a question of unrealistic expectations and the lack of contageous laughter?]. A little bit longer and the day break will get going (after it pulls down the last hindrance, like a hero in a standard story), an advantage will assemble into an offer (there will be an exchange with the daylight) - the haste will almost be overcome. Che sarà, sarà. ("Masking the business from the common eye", W. Shak.).

A disproportioned nest, НАХВАТАТЬ, increasingly noticable on the top of the increasingly barer branch [during its (still green) leaves were telling lies to it - it was letting itself into the (thrifty) assembling], always the same bus carrying a blue neon light (installed some time ago according to the instructions from the newest manager for selling/marketing the essence, but even it, the light’s ο συνδεσμος, allured hardly anyone in): the time to forget has come, the time to recall has suddenly gone.

There remained only this time in between - the interim, predictable although with a vague advantage of vanilla (cordon bleu), neither unusual nor a simple confirmation of exertion, somewhere amid amnesia and invention, sufficiently short to not proclaim itself longer than it is salvation.

* * *

(Things and Time). Things keep quiet compactly. That they are scattered (on the floor) is not contrary to regularity, they even fit each other - from the first steps (ΟΡΟΦΟΣ) to the wreath around the head (aureole of a plant ending, ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΚΟΣ ΧΩΡΟΣ).

A list of things [office accessories, mainly: the scissors, 3M scotch tape, a small bottle of Gillette’s fluid for correcting typing errors (stratum super stratum), a pencil, a hat, an old calendar, ПРЫТЬ, a bundle of written and a pile of blank paper (ex officio), the two little, round grills for Blaupunkt RL 5429 speakers - without the speakers themselves (listening to nothing axiomatically leads to something, ex necessitate rei)]; there can be added to it a few newspapers and several books, the additional silence of the obsolete contents of the former, that is of the nominal wits of the latter.

(The coming true of the passion for collecting, repose of the embodiment, in fact: РАЗРЫВ).

Collecting things (full of the convenient thoughts), stacking them on shelves or leaving them on the floor (to take care of themselves, ex mera gratia), having an agreement with them about the exchange of obstinacy (associating with their incontestableness), we pay attention to the support of at least that - the bolstering of their fixity (amidst so much inconstancy and irresolution), of the mute blessing (due to the immense disclosure - nobody feels nice while keeping silent), finally: of the feeling of belonging to the same, forged longevity, ex opere operato.

In it (the firmness) both the objects (extensive things) and time (quiet desertion) agree in one article: neither time softened the things, nor did the things harden time - like a square does with a circle, one uses the other as a cane, transiting from the rigour to the encircling of principles, by the geometric incision of time in a thing.

* * *

11/14-20/96

Even though the blinds are up, not much can be seen - it’s too early for a lightly conceived permeability. The opening of one of the windows (mismatched СЕРЬГА) doesn’t help either - besides that nothing is seen, nothing is heard: its turn is not coming through because of the written-off souls. Not having seen nor heard them (the reason and essence), although the moment of decision is getting closer, it must be that they (again) fell asleep, I contemplate. And yet, that’s not the case either because their breathing should have been heard, as well as seeing peacefulness on their faces. (Although it is possible that restlessness, instead of tranquility, caught them, and that they do not breathe until they get rid of it). ("The king hath found / Matter against him / That forever mars / The honey of his language", W. Shak.). In any case, they (the crux and perspicacity) are not around, whilst it is necessary to make the important assessment. Even without them, it (the decision) must not be unaccountable and must be based on quintessence. In the same way in which (at this moment, πρωι-πρωι, πεντεμιση) someone’s scraping the ice off his car’s windshield (before starting to scrape the rear and side windows) while letting the engine warm up, both the reason and essence must be logical and to nobody a suspicious couple (even if disguised). [Like Hiawatha, in Longfellow’s "Song of Hiawatha", and his (Indian) girlfriend, later his wife, Minnehaha]. Fully raised blinds on the windows (and one of them half open) are quite an adequate price for their appearance (even their obligingness and, why not, unassuming manner) but from them (the reason and essence), this morning either, there is not a trace nor sound, not counting, of course, the phony ones. ("Some cheats have pretended to cure diseases miraculously", Porteus). Or maybe both (the crux and perspicacity) have been here (in the room) all the time, but, having used the opportunity created with the blinds up and one window almost fully open, they came by the outer beauty of postponement (СЕТКА and СЕСТЬ), having believed its word about how such an important evaluation can still be reached without them (solitudinem faciunt, pacem appelant), as if the harmony of making up one’s mind is going to continue by itself from where it stopped to impress even the very centre of indecisiveness. Sottise!

* * *

It’s unclear to us where it (all that limpidity) went, but we do not torture ourselves much: the remnants of the gloating we spend like a full replacement, ВМАЗЫВАТЬ. (Constructing as ОСОКА). The sharp contours of that over there we have replaced with the statistical (average) values of this here (the European cricket Gryllotalpa vulgaris with its American counterpart Gryllotalpa borealis), the believing with the doubt, ourselves with someone else (stat magni nominis umbra). From the bordering of ink to the literacy of conviction - chalk dust; nothing is to be differentiated from anything, whether there blows hot or cold (souffler le chaud et le froid). (Sacrificing melted into equanimity, ПОКРОВ). Days arrayed like buses, they open like them, close like them, having taken everyone to his/her stop, the inevitableness of a balm, memory of stepping out (from this to that), sub rosa. All speaks about a process which repeats (about waiting for the same, semel pro semper). Soubrette. After periods of fearless ideas and successful revolutions, there come the disbelief and dissapointment, even of Kwasind (a character from ‘Hiawatha’), the strongest man who ever lived. (At the very bottom, not even cattle obedience is brought into question, servare modum). But, something always (again) boils, prepares for the race of Ladas, the ancient runner of proverbial swiftness. Thrown off and stepped on, it runs towards an ornamental moment. (It breaks off with the stumbling, plunges into expressiveness, inspires with cascade portrayal, γρηγορα). (It improves literacy, surrenders to a book, αργα). And that it (in these years) seems obscure and to no avail, is only a tactical variant of saturating the increasingly gluttonous adversary, offering satiety before a decisive dazzle. Soyez ferme!

* * *

While trying to make himself out, in one there increases the enforcement of self-conceit (decreases the spontaneity of perfect blessedness). He looks (eavesdrops) in order to get to something, during which there escapes from him this, at which he is. (There does not put up one knowledge with the other). He looks back upon the room, searches for a new solution - but forgets to peer into the old one. (All which he solved was trivial, all which he didn’t shrinks under СОВОК, where it keeps silent, excuses itself). He goes to the door, opens it, shuts it, watches that something behind it does not turn into a calm (το πλευρο), or, in some other way, into a stone (ο καθρεφτης). (In this way, that which is there, gets startled at the smallest noise, more in disapproval than in fear: a kind of unattainableness of a denounced saint - tanto buon che val niente). He imagines redundant details, granting them undeserved significance (attributing to the kitchen faucet leak the overbearing of a proper instant). (Tantum vidit Virgilium). He plays back the movie in his head, but cuts it off at the critical moment, rewinds it but, there too, the same unceasingness radiates from contrivances, СОВСЕМ. (Tantæne animis cælestibus iræ?). (He gives up the idea about the faultlessness of idling, gets ready for the other side - he only needs to find it). It’s no wonder that everything presents itself nicer than it is - he justifies himself before the theory of harmony and perfect proportion. He sits down on the bed (or chair), boosts preparedness or apprehension (one or the other, it’s important that something heartens him). Looking at the point from which everything started (vraisemblance), he accepts the risk (sic volo sic jubeo; stat pro ratione voluntas): the invitation card for the ball of silence he puts to one side, everything which mutters to the other, himself participating in something third, condensed as a drop, tam Marte quam Minerva.

* * *

Identifying his little, concrete situation with the universal, general (even absolute) one, one both has and has not good reason. ("A lovely purple, which we can destroy or recompose at pleasure", Boyle). He has it because his condition derived from the general one (ФАРА), but his excusableness fades away before the uninterestedness (boredom) of the absolute situation regarding the so hastily derived (and self-seeking) his. He finds consolation in something greater (tel est notre plaisir), brings closer the vindication ("Distance of recognizance bereaves", Keats), knowing well (although maybe not) that the ages settle without comparing with his. [As his time is everything to him (ХАТА), theirs are all to them (ТОРС)]. He goes down the street (amazed, turns into a limestone), anticipates agreement (takes disagreement). (He convinces himself that there must be something out there, but what - he himself doesn’t know. "The difference between reason and revelation - and in what sense the latter is superior", Watts. Indeed, in what?). He shifts from bad to worse, hoping for a warm room under pediment - ФРОНТОН: from there one could envisage something more ingratiating than a voyage to nirvana, he speculates. There breaks off (before his eyes) part by part of meaning, until the complete nonsense shows up without shame, the only one which understands him - a restrained picture of senses. Tempus edax rerum.

He’s neither here (in the room) nor there (out of it) and yet everything smells like the radiator and willow - as if there will come to the change of the aggregate state of laying down. (Η σοδα). Comparing his, exclusive/inevitable situation with the flexible yawn of the motionless (general) one, he in fact behaves capriciously - only in it (his caprice, the statement: Δεν ειναι τιποτα σοβαρο) he still finds an advantage (excuse) for the spread of all of this which glacially rolls inside perpetuity and boilingly wraps into today.

* * *

(Outside and Inside). Underneath the top, there reconsiders its math the lower layer: to stay (down there) a bit longer, or to swim out (to the surface). (It would both show itself up and not). (ΡΕΥΜΑ and ΗΛΕΚΤΡΙΚΑ ΕΙΔΗ). (It almost encourages one to ask it, as Sandys said, "Canst thou your reckonings keep?"). The two faces - the outer and inner (visible and invisible, АНТРАКТ and АРКА). ("They sat, recline, on the soft, downy bank damasked with flowers", Milton). There shows itself the outer one, during that time the inner one plans a painless participation: from the paintings by Yves Tanguy "The Certitude Of The Never Seen (1933)" and René Magritte "The Invisible World (1954)" it skips to "The Clairvoyance (1936)" by the latter (where, looking at an egg, placed on the desk on his left side, on his easel the artist completes a bird) - from there, it (the inner one) can easily fly over to this, outer side. (It, too, is after receiving, or at least sharing, the congratulations). The careless solving of concealedness - a comfortable return of enigma to the hall of reasonableness is under question. ("If people become discouraged, the kingdom of the unknowable may illegitimately annex parts of the knowable unknown", J.F.Traub in "The Unknown and the Unknowable", a critical review of "Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of Limits", by J.D.Barrow, and of "What Remains To Be Discovered", by J.Maddox). That is why they (both that which is outside and that which is inside) understand each other silently: in order to return the favour to that one which increasingly conceals itself, this one increasingly presents itself (suppressio veri, suggestio falsi), as well as the opposite is true - for the merits of the careless presentation of this one (which is outside), that one (which is inside) takes full credit, suo Marte. Wherever it is look, there presented is a half (the outer), the other (inner) half is anticipated. (That the first one is not a whole, as it is claimed, there testifies the second one - halving it). Having thrown only one, equals the effect of a weak weapon. (Telum imbelle, sine ictu). The completeness of the two faces of a single head (the old texture for yet another passé novel, simplex munditiis) warns them, however, of the agreement about sharing the recognition, leaving them to, so obediently, sleep through this day, too, on the outside, and wake up on the inside.

* * *

11/21-23/96

It’s long before daybreak - its solitude is only seen well (the illumination of fragmentariness). (The lighting up of things as their unruliness). It (the loneliness) is like a quiet (and civil) imperfection, something which, by the very fact of immovable lasting, finally becomes settled into a statue. The latter is based on a dazzling defeat or a futile victory. (That is why all statues are a bit inadequately bridled up). As much as someone, at this moment, still lives for some future day, his loyalty counts as his worth. Virtutis amore. Even if turned into a marble (to, like the said statue, watch the reasons of granite edging), none of the results of such an immobile struggle will be taken away from him (but neither added). Spolia optima. Getting up in a machinal way and acting in accordance with the expectations, the people direct themselves into today’s shortage of mystery - they forget both the automatism and taciturnity as if in this (increasingly watery) hour they’re getting rid of them. For, the daylight becomes broad (meaning that everything’s going well), while they stiffly react to such favourable news. (A little bit longer and everyone will turn into his/her statue: spes sibi quisque). ("And fire their languid souls with Cato’s virtue", Addison). Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona. The explanation for the fixity of the landscape results from the aneroid rock (a concentrated stone, without air channels, εμαγιε), but it is difficult to find the words of excuse for one, after all, suspiciously carved stand. ["Every error is a stain to the beauty of nature (sic!); for which cause it blusheth thereat (sic!)", Hooker. Spretæ injuria formæ]. Unless it (the suspiciously carved opinion) resulted from a boundless morning like this (НАТЕРЕТЬ), from inevitable circumstances with a line of permanency (НЕГА), without an excessive patheticalness except in the statue of each one of us, teres atque rotundus.

* * *

We hardly follow the lead of something (we say that we do not have of what). Cavendo tutus. ("Yonder faithless phantom", Goldsmith). КАПКАН. Having despised the festive solution - there remains inexplicableness, a fitting point to stop and look back. (Doux yeux). (Its five minutes have arrived). Rearward as the credit of the unknown and unsolvable - breaking the habit is its favourite procedure, dorer la pilule. ("The faith of the foregoing narrative", Mitford). Εχτες as halving today’s lie. A suitable moment (at the rise of expressiveness there separates the impression about an eagle, КОМЕТА), and yet such an indistinctness, ПОТЕТЬ (when, if not now, are we going to acknowledge that?). Not following any lead (having let docility step through accacia and fence, en rapport - allowing only dramatical weakness, the compensation for disturbed harmony), doubting an easy and quick solution, we pilot ourselves into daily activities like into an all-out war, ΠΡΟΣΔΕΘΗΤΕ. To formalize goals and tasks, to define methods of the struggle (to list justified means), to act with the infallibility of a front echelon - calmly and thoroughly to do that before it falls into what is now: ΟΥΔΕΝ ΠΡΟΣ ΔΗΛΩΣΗ. Corruptio optimi pessima. Disillusioning ourselves ad infinitum (an in ambiguo constant made into the dough of conviction), loosing one after another of that which we followed at a given time - we arrived at this at which we did, a certain state of Pantheon-like triumph due to the efficiently expired time, in spite of the lack of a real solution. Inde iræ.

The Man Who Picks Through the Garbage

In the community there also is a man who picks through the garbage.

He doesn’t look pitiful and ill-bred as, according to the established stereotype, such an activity would command; on the contrary, his looks are sporty and by so much he seems to be more strenous, that is agile, in good condition and incessant action - both when he gyrates around the trash and when he hastily walks off to somewhere (ΕΙΣΟΔΟΣ) or returns from there (ΑΠΑΓΟΡΕΥΕΤΑΙ Η ΕΙΣΟΔΟΣ).

With his hair cut short (ФАСОН), wearing sweat pants and running shoes of a solid quality, he strides rigidly (like an Olympian) towards the cans with junk, disposing of his catch (for today) into plastic bags and returning like a commandant to load them into the trunk of his white, mid-size, Japanese-make car.

(La propriété c’est le vol).

("He does possession keep, And is too wise to hazard partnership", Dryden).

Collecting the garbage is one of his passions, judging by his not-idling, that is, by his military efficiency in completing the job, maybe his main one - one would conclude from this barren description if, as always in cases like this (pars pro toto), one could not make a few more suppositions.

The first one is that he doesn’t do that through passion but rather in a hurry not to be noticed, even though, by all means he has a professional (normal and legal) contract with someone or something about it, but he doesn’t feel comfortable to, circling around the cans, make public such an extra income of his. (Ir por lana y volver trasquilado).

The second presumption is that this activity is his only source of income (l’argent) although, as it was said, that doesn’t seem to be the case, except if his (external) appearance (good quality running shoes, sweat pants and a car) he himself somehow made (by some move, effort, a special bafflement), so that, with such a camouflage, he could conceal the pith of the thing.

But it is also possible that he (ФАНТАЗЕР), picking through the detritus and some of it taking rashly away, so as to leave an impression that it is that what he has, at that instant, come for, in fact all the time looks for a connection, something considerably strong between the present debris and original signification, the theoretical entropy and practical rotting, the victory in war and defeat in peace, the satiety in calamity and hunger in felicity, dragging himself through a kind of a frontal tunnel, between the strata of exigency and the layers of casting aside, as an honourable army engineer of the former storm brigade, depositing all that swagger into the tenants’ waste.

* * *

11/24-26/96

(The Final Slab). On the two sides of the end: this extends over here, that spreads over there. (One’s getting ready, the other’s clearing away). Savoir faire. ("But on rode these strange horsemen, With a slow and lordly pace", Macaulay). One occupies itself with the uncovering, the other with covering. (What one exposes, the other conceals). Savoir vivre. ("But even-paced come round the years", Whittier). The end serves them as a metaphor - it’s a question of a simple slab. (Ci git). It doesn’t let one to even sneak a quick look (from one side to the other), nor to touch, although a certain possibility of a passage cannot be completely written off. ("A dim gleam the paly lanthorn throws", Gay). In principle, such a block always bars in the end. (Ο τοιχος). Where was it, and what did it do until then, asks himself the one on this side of it; the other one, on the other side, having disposed of childish attempts, only settles a bit further. They play tricks on each other about that which, in between them, looks like a barrier but, in fact, is a bond (НОРА). For, while this one roots, drills, scrapes and polishes (ОСА), and that one’s flesh creeps (ОСТАТОК) - through the hunk they offer to each other the amalgamated escape, a getaway which is covered with an alloy of metal and mercury (as a government analyst is swathed with extolling). [If something would blow the block into the air (a fake muse, et hoc genus omne), and the things got mixed up (wishfulness and pledge, et id genus omne), each one (masked by the other - excerpta) would recoil to a flawed respite - into an easy fulfillment, ex capite]. Sta viator, heroem calcas. There exist a great many stories, anecdotes, and lies about the final slab [which is called like that because it is situated (relative to both this one and that one) at the end], but it, consisting of all of that as well, defends itself in the same manner: it talks to itself, laughs, it’s only the lie that it shuns.

* * *

(Snow). In a non-transparent morning the role of snow is for something to whiten. (Ars longa, vita brevis). It starts the skirmish, later into the sunrise there connects a hope, almost a victory of principles. ("Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold", W. Shak.). This (first) snow has, therefore, that (whitening) rationalization ("Eden, and all the coast, in prospect lay", Milton), but it also has other reasons: diverting attention, coating custom, and achieving silence. (La patience est amère, mais son fruit est doux). The attention it diverts from irrevocableness in the table’s front (ЗАВЕСА), the custom it coats as a master does his chisel with momentous look (ЗАВЕТ) - in the silence it (the snow) departs all that, with no words (ЗАВОЗ). Snow: here it is and it is not - as much in the hand as it slid off it. [Even in thoughts it doesn’t subside: at one moment it snows (over them), at another - it moves off their road, en plein jour]. Yet, at its climax - nothing else remains for it but to scatter at the first touch of doubt. (Ignoscito sæpe alteri, nunquam tibi). Exactly due to that, it is dispersive: even when occupying - it feigns. (Το ενθυμιο). It looks like it’s over everything but it is over nothing, it whitens but all is bluish, it’s faultless but pours without wrapping up, it’s aggregate but infected with kaleidoscopic transitiveness, it behaves clinically with a single sheet, it overlooks inanity by burying it, it leaves for a séance but falls from the first tree, it smells on a holiday but it’s only Monday, it keeps away from procession but it consists of it, everything which it is doing it does from inattentiveness: from there it pricks our eyes with muteness of a polar pistil, en vérité.

A Human

The very look at a human’s construction fills one up with horror rather than admiration. (Il sent le fagot).

That even moves about (repositions as if, there too, it doesn’t shelter itself from the thoughts): so outsized hands, legs and head - and such an ending concord. Παστα.

An entire organism of clemency and ill - while the show has just started.

(Body as a camp of soul, skin as the canopy of a tent - camping beneath the forehead). Il penseroso.

On what basis is that stable at all (he cogitates about himself, bristling asthmatically).

He meanders up and down (finishes chores by returning from the hunt), collapses into the chair (tries to put himself together in spite of the truth). He puts ПЕРСТЕНЬ on.

He is halfway through - neither there nor here. ПЕРЕСКАЗ.

So much sense around, but the nonsense is what bugs him ("In what particular thought to work I know not", W. Shak.) - how come the awareness got precisely him? (As if in the state of not being aware of, not everything would be the same, only lulled in).

If he doesn’t muse himself - the things seem fine (il conduit bien sa barque), disenchanted - he doubts that too (il a le diable au corps).

With all the hankering (his itches for the whole lot) he’ll make it out easily, all he needs is to catch an instant of insolence. (In a restful vestibule there wait for him quivers).

Himself unsure of it, he still takes up the elucidation, leaving the impression as if he knows what he’s doing, not even believing himself. (Il est plus aisé d’être sage pour les autres, que pour soi-même).

He messed up everything, it’s only a question of time when he’s gonna plead guilty of that, and yet, if he didn’t give it a yank - it would stay at zilch (immedicabile vulnus).

Whatever to mull over (what on earth to do), or to become reticent (to wane down the river), or to scream (to yell at Grus, between Microscopium and Aquarius), it’s all the same for him: nothing more enormous (like astra, the planta with a star flower as a prerequisite of its unwrapping) will unravel to him in his fist crammed with the notion of such inconsequential participation and such a momentous stopover, in foro conscientiæ.

* * *

11/27/12/02-03/96

It’s important to have a corner (locality, ПЕРРОН, το δχειο), to safeguard the residue.

(What is that which is left over is best known by those whom even that is not lingering for, jure divino).

To stack it (the remainder) according to a merit (empathy, memento, resistance), to indemnify it from unexpectedness, then to forget it.

(Jure humano).

But not completely because - the empathy would run dry, the memento would back out (as a minimum, it would become ineffectual), while the resistance would disappear.

With the memento spiritless, this morning would downgrade to the only one in evidence, without the empathy an unresponsiveness would be instituted in it, devoid of the resistance there would come up to an early slavery.

But the looked after (not utterly forgotten) reminiscence is giving up to the morning’s compassion with a measure, holding that the rising (confrontation) will come at the right moment, too.

* * *

(Watching the Squirrels From the Window). We live in a fist of time, behaving as if we made it a handful - like these squirrels (under the window) which do not hold back.

Such an immense snow, and they sing their own praises.

("Figures harder than the marble itself", Dryden).

At that, with abrupt moves (characteristic for them), they scatter as much as they gather.

Of course, it only seems like that - they collected all they needed; here they only play, rerouting thoughts (taking attention off inescapability, ex propriis).

Nimium ne crede colori.

Still, besides all due credits, what are they hopeful of, on top of such an inkling (whereby they twitch at any sound)? One even must not start coughing - they flee up a twig.

(They suspend themselves upon future dust, το νημα).

On the wire beween two posts, they run as upon a copula between boasting and fright. (ПРОСПЕКТ).

They probably do it that way because that’s how they apprehend it. Otherwise, they would start wondering (about it), not reacting for a long time, maybe never. (ПРОТЕСТ).

In this way, observed from the legendary window (of loneliness or revelation, depending on what’s being looked at), they turn over in a major dream, ex post facto.

They fancy kaleidoscopic season, suitable for these dubious tales, for the list of days which deceitfully expands (by copying identical hours).

(No es oro todo lo quo reluce).

Or, perhaps, these stories serve them as a curtain (beverage, САМОВАР) - performing all this so effortlessly, they may be working on something more difficult.

("The cause of reflection is not the impinging of light on the solid or impervious parts of bodies", Newton).

On something hung without vacillation between the sky and earth, full of the squirrelly inquisitiveness as if counting only on it, as if someone (or something) else’s presence would impede the rage framed by this (all-seeing) window, render it inoperative to eternalize yet another, soon a recoiling picture.

* * *

(Absence and Multitude). When so many thoughts soar through one’s head, they do that so that it (the head, alone) would be not winging through their, introverted woods, МЕСТНОСТЬ, lex loci.

But, often, there pass by minutes, hours (the inflexibility of a weighing machine as credentials of the weighing, ВЕРНОСТЬ, lex non scripta) - yet, there is neither a trace nor a voice from the thoughts.

(Even when, contended with something, they swiftly show up - that doesn’t last long).

From a diagonally located apartment there comes a chat (liberum arbitrium, from the fixation with voice to the encircling with sound). By propagating all the way to here, it gets rid of indisposition, not of worthlessness though. (Behaviour of speakers as a disguised satiety, form of the things taken out to the practical terrain, εφαγα).

Something is forthcoming, it is sensed in the deficiency, hidden in the benefit. (τα θαλασσινα). Le vrai n’est pas toujours vraisemblable.

Something which withdraws from the head like from an unfinished job (levamen probationis), drips from the multitude into the absence of thoughts [from one fraud to the other - showing itself exaggeratedly, as if it (normally) is not there], visualizing itself as a celebratory and fine (leve fit quod bene fertur onus), skewed like a little flag for marking the place of sojourn of an obdurate portrayer of this all, packed with the words about two, or three precious moments.

* * *

12/04-05/96

(A Cycle). In this morning, too, as in the old way: water, carefully brimming over its apex (the radiator), gives confidence, the man who, at 6:03, comes out of the building and gets into his car, just did it again, the pitfall of misunderstanding is discovered on time - considering the routine support provided by the events and things, there is no reason for panic. (Littera scripta manet). ЗНАТЬ. To all of that, in a soft-hearted way, there adds the symbolics of stillness - in which manner the deserved repose is reached. (Lis litem generat). ("To be always polite, you must be sometimes insincere", Reade). And right when it seemed that everything fitted (litem lite resolvere), full of a funny feeling the water in the radiator stopped, the man got out of his car and came back to the building, the misunderstanding started to proliferate - even though all this was to do with only a natural (normal) return to the beginning: meanwhile, that is, the day has expired and there fell, not seen for a long time, such a clear night. (Locum tenens). As a rule (as always), at that hour the heat is turned off anyway, there even returns the one who’s always late, while the misunderstanding pulls out from under the sheets of understanding and stretches before the sleep (more exactly, it decorates with them, having other plans - locos y niños dicen la verdad). As if nothing happened (το φιλμ), all returned to the initial clew, the water, the man, and the foolish feeling of illusiveness, and while the radiator cools down and the man puts his glasses away (next to the lamp shiver), and stares at himself (longe aberrat scopo), the misunderstanding gains in strength, extricating itself from the daily stiffness, from the drawer, from the tea box and obsession with self-interest, the price for the sauciness with which, clearer than it was supposed to be, everything insignificant started as significant, locus classicus.

* * *

(Analysis). When everything’s added together, only the counting’s done - not that which was being added. (Nobody’s sum is known before it is due). Honos habet onus. Adding themselves atop each other, the events (things too, Ilias malorum) solidify the participant, making him an increasingly reserved observer. It was on time that he stopped casting his vote, expressing himself, propounding. ("All the arts of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas", Locke). Neither in an ordinance does he find anything (incredulus odi), not to mention not finding anything in an acclamation to prevailing thinking (ΑΝΤΙΚΕΣ) - still less, however, being able to stand the, so-called, dissidents, he didn’t (contrary to the main one of those) take refuge to a (Vermont) farm, even though he got hold of a rural composure, id genus omne. [Everything will settle to its place, he knows, when it (the place), is not here anymore. Il faut attendre le boiteux]. ("Set honor in one eye and death i’ the other, And I will look on death indifferently", W. Shak.). Having added up and not being surprised with the extravagance of conclusion, he’s left with a dominant spider on the lower seal of the heedful window - the eight-legged animal would like him to share the enterprising attitude about the necessity of keeping. (Why would it, otherwise, get hard-edged outside of the urban net, НАОТРЕЗ?). ("Upborne with indefatigable wings", Milton). The feasibility of association (with the permanently dislocated arachnid), however, he keeps at bay - in that way it (the practicability) is not being spent, it even rebuilds, having served itself the results of the analysis of the sum in moments of the accentuated solitariness of the result.

Fault and Sinlessness

12/06-17/96

Looking at the watch (because of whose mechanism the morning silence additionally blinds), one doesn’t see the benefit of it: if it is counting down - it does that to itself too; if it is not - it’s time to replace it. Nolens volens.

("After that the holy rites are ended", W. Shak.).

Occupied with it (the watch) as with a calculated impeccability, the other faults captivate us in vain - they present themselves better than they are (foi en tout), in order not to feel left out.

A world based on faults is no worse than an embelished world - the latter, with an understood hypocrisy (fuyez les dangers de loisir), sweetens too conspicuously, asymmetrically, feeling as if in a jacuzzi.

The realness of a fault is its virtue. НАПЕРСТОК.

("He blushes; therefore he is guilty", Spectator).

Preaching about infallibility breaks at the first stride in the room. ("’Tis the wish to look wise, not knowing how", Moore).

Wherever to look - all’s wrapping into a fault. Το καταγμα. [(If sinlessness is imposed upon it, НАПОР - it will not get anywhere today either (it’s excusing itself)].

And yet, aware that this is going nowhere, the improver of the world does not know what to do with the fallibility: rejecting it he would be left with boredom (no hay cerradura si es de oro la ganzúa), keeping it he wouldn’t be able to defend himself from it (noli irritare leones), hence he turns it into sinlessness (noli me tangere), convincing his followers in it (himself convinced into the honourable/heroic deed).

The only thing in which he, again, misled himself, was in that he incorrectly compared: the fault is measured by faultlessness, the sinlessness is kept for sin.

* * *

Ennoblement (Written at the ocassion of an appropriate, pre-Christmas recital, aired over PBS): A virtue at the moment of lack of other virtues - it can be noticed by the colour of relying upon, and by the fairy sound. (Η πολυθρονα and СТРЕКОЗА).

Gray and yellow on the outside (an antiquity is always recommendable), quiet (illustrious) on the inside - it echoes like dispersed snow or a tone from an acoustic guitar, aperçu. It shows up whenever it is the least expected (a trained vindication of yet another haughty age, СТРОКА), through daring change it finds a nice word for recent inconsiderateness too, æquo animo.

In the twilight of a studio room featuring a moderately flaming fireplace, that is, with an assumed inclination towards recitation, ballade (fondness from a nominal upbringing of senses - heaviness of ТОННА), accompanied by a corresponding string instrument (its appearance mainly - the exterior sprinkled with cryogen lacquer), the ennoblement offers itself as a logical deliverance of sense: both the performers and the audience searching for such a necessary account came, after all, all the way to here. That it is unreal, âme de buoe (in disharmony with a general impression of the world, à main armée) is being forgotten in such a way so as to cause the feeling of remissness in the present public (crede quod habes, et habes) to identify itself with the calm of the moment.

Emphasizing so instantaneously acquired ennoblement as a highest decoration of nobility as a phenomenon (Croix rouge), the members of the fine troupe, in an appropriate (festive or pre-festive) situation, propose their ingratiating behaviour as a basis for oblivion, possibility for continuation (aide toi, et le ciel t'aidera) - as a little white innocence of a rationally planned afternoon hour of purification.

* * *

Time as an anticipation: something which is getting away (that which is being expected). Absit omen. It’s anticipated rather than observed (faintly seen, it holds back) - the indistinct means more to it than the intelligible. Νερικοςηο.

It lets alone neither itself nor the others - it (that which is being anticipated, ab initio) is always in a light, almost a mindful panic (a false alliance, ab intra). ТРЕВОГА. ("Let tigers match with hinds, and wolves with sheep", Dryden). It is felt behind the wall, window and door, and yet - by them it is separated (placed there). Ab incunabulis. ("Knock at study, where, they say, it keeps", W. Shak.). Its is to be waited for, to spin into flax (a kind of fibrous peerlessness) - to not walk inside the abode without a need (ad libitum).

We always think: something’s going to happen - waiting for it, we gape through the window, go through the door (with the thoughts through the wall). (Ad astra per aspera).

Something which is late but, according to the agreement, presents itself as arriving. СКОРО. ("To, Achilles! to, Ajax! to!", W. Shak. Animo et fide).

The principle of awaiting - that which is waited for and the one who waits, set to maintain each other at a prescribed distance, watching that neither crosses the line of separation and shows itself in the full light to the other one because, then, there would be nothing left of the waiting for, nor of the one who waits: there would remain only an indifferent sigh of a noble ambush of gaudily dressed spare time from within.

What Exists And What Does Not Exist - II

12/18-20/96

One is the world which exists, another which does not. (For example, this one does exist, the other one doesn’t. Ποτε εγινε?).

This which exists is obvious, imaginable (ad captandum vulgus), the other one is its antipode: it is neither obvious nor can it be imagined (dignus vindice nodus).

That which doesn’t exist is keen on nothing (consilio et prudentia), this which exists takes interest in all and everything (constantia et virtute).

Who comes out from that one which does not exist - he enters the one which exists (РАЗЫГРАТЬ), and when he leaves this one which exists - he returns to that one which does not exist (РОК).

Who plays with fire in this (world) which exists - he buys off a place in that (world) which doesn’t exist, who acquiesces in that one which does not exist - he drags over the ashes from this one which exists. (Fama semper vivat).

When the time has come for this one to exist - to that one it expired, hence it does not exist. Αναλογως.

And when there comes the time that this one which exists does not exist, that one which, until then, did not exist, is going to exist. En règle.

So that, of them two, there always exists one and does not exist the other one. (Chacun à son goût).

The one which, at a given moment, exists, lends its head to that which doesn’t exist; the one which, during that time, does not exist, becomes a reason for the demise of this one which exists. Ex more.

Until a whole sabre from half of scabbard (РОЗГА), beheads the one which exists (ab ovo), and plants the lack of it in the one which does not exist (ab origine), so that they would no longer bang it, pondering about that other one which exists and does not exist. Absit invidia.

* * *

(Security). It’s 5:55, but everything’s been said a long ago - in the same way properly, almost dully (three A’s for a single mindfulness, foi pour devoir). (Like a white border of rose bulbs - full of attention and melancholy of lateness).

("There is no uniformity, no norma, principle, or rule, perceivable in the distribution of the primeval natural agents through the universe", J. S. Mill).

Although the (once again empty) bus came down the (still dark) street and so, in this arrangement of things, let know to not expect too much in the next half an hour, it is felt (in spite of such an indisputability) that everything twinkles - the tightness of an accident (the stretching of comfort, ПОСТАНОВКА, fons et origo) lurks beneath the equanimity of solution.

(Even a thought sting counts as an adventure). Flosculi sententiarum.

There starts a classical day. (Flux de bouche). All who make it to its end slept through its beginning, all the others (who got up unendurably early) stopped shining after the first hour. (Finem respice).

To go to meet the challenge of inspiration (to become tempted to change everything - a sudden and successful revolution, ντυνομαι), or to not get involved with mending today either (to agree to apathy and placability, νυσταξω)?

(Finis coronat opus).

(Standing up from the chair), bringing the cup with the tea of impeccability closer, we appease the thirst of our first and last mistake - consenting to this security.

* * *

(The Feast). Something flashed but it is not known what. ТРЕСК. Car lights probably, in the aperture of the immovable (still murky) first degree of morning, or ФАРФОР. The morning is (even symbolically) stiff, it resembles collusion with an old truth, inter spem et metum. (The old truth is that from such early promises it’s hard to expect a realization of a solid day). Having scraped the ice off the vehicle, a maintenance worker speeds up the jeep (property of the landlord) with a snow plow attached to it, maneuvering it up and down the parking lot (plowing the snow), making proper (almost precious) edges of bearable transparency - the seams or the walls for a sudden castle? (He who moves in there will have large rooms and a nice view). Intra parietes. How far did all of this go is best seen from the significance of this moment from where there dazzles (a communiqué) that this is nothing new either. Cadit quæstio. But, there is no joke with the routine either. One ought to possess a know-how about that too, regardless that it repeats itself. To persevere in keeping the importance of a detail cared for, to not go too far in thoughtfulness, nor in maliciousness. To process both the end and the beginning (ФРОНТ), to take care of the middle (ФРАГМЕНТ). To bring out the quarry (elements of a whisper), to distribute it on equal parts for all at this feast. To decorate the large (solemn) table with inevitability, to serve the lack of questionableness in white gloves. To have a feeling of anatagonizing thoughts, to let them have a blow-out (to hold to ФРАК). To not make a sensation of this banquet either (even if some of the guests would request that). To have a measure: the fact that of it (this morning, νωρις) came out more than it was expected - to receive with an esteem and regardful correctness, though not exceeding the nominal threshold (η ουλη) of sensibility. (Scar of sensibility as sector of panorama, natale solum). (Natura lo fece, e poi ruppe la stampa). The polar chalk: to be polite at any price, to restrainedly feast with all of this, as if it’s not a question of a masterpiece of snow above the ice, but of a holiday morning before going home.

* * *

01/06-08/97

(New Year). To tenacious time nothing escapes: it changes years as if changing days. Allez-vous-en!

("Never to be infected with delight, Nor conversant with ease and idleness", W. Shak.).

Because of that the months, days, and minutes are left with no option except to, even more obediently, line up: their, lesser, changing is designed into the bigger one with no opposition, au naturel.

Pieces of darkness - but it already flashes like morning (ФОН), later on a whole day - still kept hidden before the evening (ГОРН). [It itself didn’t come true, and yet it (already) latched onto something else].

By itself, the changing of the seasons, hours, and of one agnosticism with the other, would not present an unpleasantness (a retrospective surprise) if it would not have to do with double intention. (Benedetto è quel male che vien solo).

On one side, it’s being insisted on an everlasting truth, on the other - the flattery of lies completes in the flattering words of approbation. (Fax mentis incendium gloriæ).

Executed and neatly sealed according to the rules, the newest change (of one year by another) is only a formalized section of, in essence, a spoiled hankering after temporal liberation from the truth - Fata obstant.

["The thinking of thinking (noesis noesos)”, Aristotle, c/o М. Ђурић - a mediated EP* or dwelling bitterness, the highest form of activity or ritual of transcendentness, modification of fever or fever of alteration, alibi for God or God as an alibi?]. {*Extra Perception}.

Ο Καινουριος Χρονος: while one is being replaced by the other (in the, so-called, New Year’s Eve), there eternalizes the original impression of a free fall through the pristine fold of the, so-termed, calendar, according to which (at that moment) all this happens as gently as to drive away a thought about the possible coarseness of yet another year.

* * *

Between Twelve Thirty and One: Insignificantly aimed, there scatters (with such an easiness it presents itself, ex professo) the newest light snow.

(It snows but wonders like ineffectual thoughts, ФОСФОР: here it is - but as if at some other place it is; silicon - but as protein it glows, ex usu).

It’s passing by, but as if it’s not doing that either. (It levitates due to the lightness of participation).

At one moment it flies over to the side, at another it stays in the centre, too light for descent - it doesn’t fall, ex voto.

It neither touches something, nor does it have direction - it propagates instead of settling down, goutte à goutte.

It would both land and not land (both pass the news and keep quiet about it).

Expertus metuit. (To inhabit the self - to plead for from the outside).

Becoming heavier - it would start going downwards, getting lighter - it would move upwards; in this way it’s exactly as light and heavy as needed for that state of apparent stumbling. Μετριοςαο.

As when there snows through a light doubt, disbelief or suspicion (with a reasonable dose of rapture, fidei defensor) - the justified moments between the ground and the rising, the allowed extent of levitation (floating), НАГОТА.

If it was heavier it would already break, if it, however, was lighter it would not stop still by the window. (Gaudium certaminis).

In this way, neither too heavy nor too light, only a sign-post (to some sort of adaptability, fide et fiducia), it neither backs down nor does it advance, neither becomes truth nor extinguishes itself - it performs an exemplary dance upon the voidness (fide et fortitudine), that (ripped out) time of the early afternoon (between twelve thirty and one), when everything else froze up because of the intolerable significance.

* * *

(The Garage). The view from the room is of a garage. (Loci communes). ("Enterprises of great pith and moment", W. Shak.).

Asymmetrical, of a pigeon’s colour (turbulent gray) - it looks compact. (Even a post ventured to an identical posture on its right side, in pace).

At that, only the garage side wall is well seen - everything else, including one next to the other doors on its front side, is already suspiciously slanted. (КАТОК). Even that, the side wall, is pretty much cracked. (A well advanced journey to the other side of antiquity, or en revanche?).

And here there would be an end of the note about the garage - if it was in question. (Η οραση).

But the question is, of course, in that wherever we stop (intra muros), whatever room we look from (insouciant), we look at something prosaic (recognizable from somewhere), still like an ox (left to itself), of a colour of an easy target (a sitting duck), founded on (quasi)meaning (roofed by apprehension), demolished by a crumb (split by a modest rind), entangled by application (disentangled by the wind), pierced by a brick like by an eye-lid, protruded by the caprice of the back-yard’s universe, shifted towards hope that it is going to shine before it resigns. Placenta.

What Is Seen And What Is Not Seen

01/09-10/97

What is seen - it sputters, what is not seen - it swings. [What is seen, it bridles up (ВОСТОРГЕ), what is not seen, (bent over) it lurks (ПАСХА)].

Distinct edges, eyeteeth, stuff (what is seen) - the incontestability of significance; alleviation, abatement, endurance (what is not seen) - the avidity of insignificance. (Ne tentes, aut perfice).

The setting of the street (something goes down - a bus, something heads up - an early schoolboy), January noiselessness - yawn of the ice, an airplane carrying business people of correct behaviour (ni firmes carta que no leas, ni bebas agua que no veas), a re-shaping of uninteresting destinies in an apathetic protectorate, the indestructibleness of a state, inscrutability of the lamp above the left shoulder, the indivisibility of prevailing opinion (nihil ad rem, stupidity in the concluding crescendo) - the carnival flash of the clumsy (heavy) picture, covered with alkali. (The magnificence of indisputability in the sense in which it is graphically given, ο ναος).

[The collision of great proportions (what is seen hit what is not seen) - but from the accacia there drops only resin, inopem copia fecit].

What is seen sat (in full gear) in the rocking chair: swaying back and forth, and from side to side, it shields what is not seen so that there would not occur to it that it could be seen as easily as just like that.

* * *

(Indifference and Vanity). What is that which, described, does not get upset, and what is that which, when described, frets? Something is suitable for description (РАССКАЗ) - that which behaves as if nothing has happened (sang-froid), but something isn’t - that which is curled up before the jump (sans cérémonie). In the first case, there it is portrayed the indifference (relâche), in the second - vanity (par privilège). The portrayal of the former encompasses the garden, bridge, reconcilableness with fate; describing vanity there it is described an occupation force, imposed state, play behind the scene. The lasciviousness of the latter encourages the trimness of the former, as well as the opposite is true. It is easier to describe the first than second. Poking the second is not recommended, chatting with the first is offered instead, religio loci. A pressure is being applied to stay within the bounds of the first, to forget about portraying the second. (Emphasized is dividing, ПОРОГ). Occupier: unquestionableness (obedience, submissiveness), bombardment as the cream on a cake - these are all requirements of the vanity (its répertoire); the indifference reconciled itself with all of that long ago, renovato nomine. To bring vanity into the question - that’s moving out from indifference: as in any turmoil of the kind, the one who’s doing that can expect a certain loneliness, εκτος απο. But, even lonely, he is not worse off - on the contrary, he’s better off than he’d be in the indifferent crowd of humming under the sick supervision of vanity (res angusta domi), having not got rid of it by means of the oblivion of a fly, even less through the equanimity of the paysage, an ink for the empty pen of convenience. Renovate animos!

Sufferance and Attainment

01/11/97

To cease when it’s easiest, to outlive when it is most difficult - so do spiders and, in general, the attentive beings (that’s their principle). Nil conscire sibi nulla pallescere culpa. Dried out (without food, but steeled with that trouble), waiting for prey (η υποχρεωση), their endurance increases with every hour, and when (taken aback) an insect gets trapped in their web, they (strengthened ultimately) wrap it so heedfully (almost passionately, ο φακος), that often in the process, suddenly (and irreversibly), (carried away) they first fall off from it, benumb on the floor and shrink to the atomic doll. (Having found them in cocoons of impartiality, we wipe them off: mihi cura futuri). Since it is slightly probable that this happens to them by accident, with that they emphasize the said principle, ПЕРЕВЕС.

Such an attitude (relationship) of theirs towards sufferance and attainment radically differs from that of humans. Having attained something, having entered a degree of achievement, it doesn’t occur to them to break it off; also - in suffering many stumble. But, that’s somehow natural (given) for (to) them and, because of that, these few words about it seem to be purposeless (n’importe). Are they? It depends on someone’s look at things. Nitor in adversum.

Having fired the gun onto the powder magazine at the moment of a full mental and physical health (in a critical, but by so much magnificent situation), faced with coming out to an open field sprinkled with dots of a velvety consistence of meaning, neither Vojvoda (the Duke of) Синђелић nor Major Тепић withstood the temptation (nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus): they activated the war room within contours of a larger, in any case an eternal dwelling. СВЕРХ.

On the other side, stretching their increasingly preposterous days on Florida (mediocria firma), or in some other pre-fabricated paradise (not mentioning more delicate, less attractive, ruined old ages), the protagonists of the prevailing viewpoint long ago (and irreversibly) replaced the instant of attainment with more and more sufferance which, of course, does not kill instantaneously but gradually. (Some, once fallen into it, and as it’s already been said, shorten it - me judice).

Which is better of the two (not all are, nor do they have to be, Тепићs and Синђелићs) - it is not an intention of this comparison to answer, thus obliging itself unnecessarily. (Mens sibi conscia recti). Proposing (as the better) the first option, there threatens it a danger that it is advertising an, out of a blue, inadequately reconstructed heroism or, at least, hypocrisy (given that the proponent himself is still budging around); on the other hand, submitting that the second is better would not propound anything new, which is not in the works already, modo et forma.

Such things are to be neither put forward nor should they be dully fulfilled (ni l’un ni l’autre): they happen by themselves, according to some order of theirs, mainly a monotonous one, known in advance, with the rare pearls of independent decision about the nonsense and sense - the surrogates of the sufferance and attainment, two habitual carefulnesses, meum et tuum.

* * *

01/12-14/97

(Queerness). It is dramatic, but it’s only midnight. (What is going to happen when it still gets darker?).

It’s dramatic because here, for some reason, over this middle-sized place, the sky smoulders like phosphorus, it looks reddish even though, at this hour, it’s becoming heavier, transiting into a purple, although, a weightless hush (СОН), or simply dark, would be more normal.

It flames up, but ash was expected.

(Wars are on, but peace was signed).

It’s red-hot, but it’s supposed to have been put out. [Purple instead of numbness, reverberation instead of (recursive) quietness, СПАЗМ].

This is, approximately, how it is seen through the window - as if it is going to catch fire (СЕРП), instead of to die out (СОНЕТ).

The most probable (and most rational) explanation for this, nevertheless a local phenomenon (ντοπιοςαο), is that such, rose light, over this city in the middle of the night, is a result of a greater number of ruddy street lights. However, their working is still sporadic (not all of them are operational), insufficient for such a visible effect.

The next possible interpretation is that this kind of light comes from a larger city, some fifteen to twenty miles away - perhaps the street lights of that colour are more numerous there. (Prêt d’accomplir).

In any case, the least likely is that this illumination is being created in a rather queer (miraculous, irrational, per ambages) manner. Lucus a non lucendo.

Unless the queerness (maître des hautes œuvres), aware itself of the disbelief that it would have to face in an objective observer, made sure to increase the number of appropriate lights in his consciousness in a strange way, to then burst through the window, pour over into mare clausum.

Carefully Reading Desanka Maksimović

Having taken to read the short stories by Десанка Максимовић (not her poems, epea pteroenta), not going further than the first or second page of any of the narratives from the collection "HOW THEY LIVE", one can easily put together another poem of this poetess, unearth it from where it was only a little concealed by the inflicted asymmetry:

"Yellowness of blossomless hawthorne
Uncanonized dawn
If it would get closer to the clearing
It would cast light upon the right side of the ravine
While the left would still feel chilly in dew"

Her compound-words (remedial thoughts, resonus) are taken, extracted by pincers from the text thrown open, composed to make her newest poem, imo pectore. (The assumption is that her granting an approval to our humbleness for a bosom relation with her words has been obtained).

To throw away the newspapers, to turn off the apparatuses, to break off the conversation, to step out from the mob (hoi polloi: to get rid of the dull and illiterate ones, to clear off from language contamination, to separate from the tittle-tattle and blabbing) - for at least a moment to save ourselves by means of her. ГАВАНЬ. (Hodie mihi, cras tibi).

To clear the mind about her not participating in this lonely hour only because she’s not present here (hinc illæ lacrimæ), for the reason that she is. (To languish doubly, to have an ontological alibi).

Such kind of presence (a sudden visit) leads to the idea about a larger organism (ОСТАТОК) which, instead of from these, consists from those little tubes that is springs that is sensibility which, when one of the parts finishes its chore for the day, rings up in that (the only) tone, in which the pieces [which in the given being (a signification field) still boil or already cool down] recognize each other, falling into a resonance, the mediated knowledge, continuing to swing a large common bell (η ιστιοπλοια), full of indispensability of a consolation - the literalness of the accomplices in a tentative situation of the presence or absence of a sagacious and the most admirable lady.

* * *

(The Desecration of Dawn). A false-hearted silence: all the large systems perpetually hum. (What is not heard nor seen - it does not mean that it does not exist). (Present is always one of 32 Flavors - Ani diFranco, c/o S.&M.L.). The nets, codes, detectors, sondes, bugged lines, radars, committees, national security advisers (in this Universe!? - the remodelled bursting forth), schizophrenia, paranoia, and cables which interconnect all of that - while there presents itself (videtur) this sleepy hour only [Agency’s fiber optics, slowed down by tolerability of the weak light bulb (25 Watts)]. ("When peevishness and spleen succeed", Swift). At the three thousand foot depth (at a macro-cut of the water bluntness, РАВЕНСТВО), a sonar is turned on (vox et præterea nihil), and yet all is so hushed - there it is heard only the fluid in the radiator, seen only a furrowed tree through the window (grooved by the frost of corroborated staring of a winter puma, zum Beispiel). Vulgo: one is the outer flow, the other is the inner. On the outside: it deceives, inside: it hides. (Μπορειτε να το τυλιξετε, παρακαλω?). (One is what presents itself, the other which digs beneath, volventibus annis). The defilement of the dawn rounds off with this. It fallaciously started, and it’s erroneously completing (this trained, reconciled representation of it). (СПОНТАННОСТЬ). According to it (the outward image) - it (the dawn) is not taking sides, but, this morning as well, there it is attentively listened secretly to all; or it’s said that it (the morning) is innocent, but, this early - yet there already blossoms something akin to conspiracy. (In contrast to Tannhäuser, a knight from a German legend who, after coming back to Rome and not getting the requested absolution, returned to his sins, this morning has no where to return - Venusberg is pathetically sweetened for its taste, not even Wagner would have been able to sharpen it). True, it’s left with an option to not rise, but that would bring only a false peace to it. (Virtus in actione consistit). As always, it (the dawn) knows - its desecration it can cure only with its scorn towards the obsession of Service and malady of State: vera pro gratiis.

* * *

01/15-20/97

(Disarranged Life). Irritated with the outcome, the spider lets itself into a search of a more just solution. [A tenacious roommate - ο τενωνας, smaller rather than bigger - it’s not looking forward to plucking itself from this situation either. Full of the archtype convention (a sort of silky tautness of being), ВОСК, it would give everything away if it could net only - not having to unweave it, too].

A person who warms up his car for so long (it’s only mid-January), must have been frozen since last April. (Vis vitæ).

From a no-nonsense aspect, into these descriptions there most often get the lusts of a certain (given) spider (venia necessitati datur) as well as tenants’ troubles with winter - especially the length of time of warming up a car engine (vis inertiæ). (Even though it theoretically exists, everything else is of a lesser practical significance).

Under different circumstances and conditions, other possibilities and activities would be available, but the portrayal in question faithfully deals with this here only. (Μενω εσω).

However, as (by the nature of things) the ascension of an insect (НАВЫК), and the warming of an automobile (НАГНЕТАТЬ) are monotonous, that is the least exciting, rather than motivating processes, and since, due to that, one must not stop at them and still count on the vigilance and attentiveness of a hurried appraiser of signification - it is necessary, in addition to the (standard) depiction of the bug and the machine (velis et remis), to pour on top of it the provocations, disparities, calls and analyses, found (derived) as usual (without moving out of the room), and conveniently cloaked into the, so-called, trivialities of a moment (the said spider, car engine, ventre à terre) which, truth to say, lasts a whole eternity already, in spite of the disarranged life.

* * *

(Faithfulness and Perseverance). Through each of these places the road took me well before the final move. It happened, in each case, that I passed by all of them, in some stayed for a short while, returned (most often to T.), forgot all of that and then, by the concurrence of events (and, of course, going after work), moved into each one of them, thereby residing there for a longer time.

("Gates of burning adamant, Barred over us, prohibit all egress", Milton).

Concretely, that happened in cases of K., W., and now S. ("Generalities and abstractions do not demand our prolonged consideration", Rose Elizabeth Cleveland).

There nears its end my sojourn in S. - this year I’ll be returning to W. ("I feel me much to blame, So idly to profane the precious time", W. Shak.).

The notes from S. (Sch’dy) I’m bringing to their small-minded end (all the rest I let to the generous beginning). (Pettiness of mind as generosity of voyage). Virtus sola nobilitat.

But that is not of interest here; of relevance (and under the scrutiny) is rather the recurring of the places. РАЗВОРОТ.

I passed by K. (I remember that I read its name on a highway post, asking myself what it ment as it was of Indian origin) two years prior to moving there, through W. I passed a whole fifteen years preceding settling there, while in the case of S. - I stayed in it for two weeks, thirteen years before this arrival and the two-year stay. (Vera prosperità è non necessità).

And all of that would be understandable if any of the places were bigger or more important, some large city for which there exists a higher probability that one passes through and then, under other circumstances, moves in. But, the said places are rather smaller and by so much less significant; it was more likely that I didn’t hear about them beforehand. (Actually, they’re not as small as the size itself is measured on a different scale here. Each one of them is larger than, for example, Ужице or Врање - ubique patriam reminisci).

Having learned, therefore, about them ahead of time, (from this point) it may be seen as if the clue in each one of them started to uncoil earlier (ο χρονος), long before the very insolence of the factual (formal) moving with which, in each of the cases, we only returned to something that, for a long time already, feverishly (informally but not sleepily) smouldered, something which we forgot but it, as it turned out, was more faithful and perseverant than us, un fait accompli.

* * *

(The Corridor). Where I work, the corridors are long. One is outstandingly stretched, at least half of a kilometer. (Totus, teres, atque rotundus). It’s pretty narrow, its maximum width is three and a half meters. Its walls are actually metal plates (as anywhere else in those buildings), covered with a greasy paint, once upon a time of a conservative, pastel colour (a commissionary inflexibility), now undeterminable. Its ceiling is torn asunder, cleft up, tombé des nues: the tiles, which are supposed to be there, are permanently missing (РЕМОНТ) but it (the ceiling) still exists - consisting of the cables, pipes, valves, and circuit breakers. СЕТЬ. Its floor covering is made of linoleum squares which (once too) featured another, brownish colour. This colour preserved itself only along the hallway edges, which means that the floor is colourless, increasingly so towards the centre line - there, the floor covering is completely worn out due to the many years of walking on it. (Η βολτα). (This complex of buildings was built some fifty years ago, with another use in mind, as a temporary solution that is, which, obviously, had beaten many permanent ones).

In the corridor (as in the thousands similar to it - it is, of course, them which are in question here) there exists a whole world. Full of the absurdity and consenting (appropriate) convention, but isn’t it like that at any other place of the same nature as this?

Someone (still fit, tirailleur) hastily passes by, others (clumsy and heavy for quite some time, tête de famille) clog up the way, on the sides there form small groups of a few participants, conferring about the work ("Those drawings/documents are to be checked once more", "I gave him the state diagram yesterday; expect his comment today", "Could you take the ownership of this, Joe; we’ll have a team get going on Wednesday", "The critical cross-section (effective area) doesn’t match the coefficient of moderation", "Then, tomorrow morning, at fifteen past eight - the first thing on the agenda is the completion of the test bed, the contractor’s been called in, too", "The awareness gotta be raised, the initiative too", "The communication must be improved", "At the meeting, I’ve mentioned to him the urgency of the date". Tot homines, quot sententiæ).

The discussers shine similarly to an old oil (toga virilis) - long ago having stopped trying to instantaneously disappear from all this, stuffed and tamed they, in fact, spend most of their lives in the corridor, and even when one or two beauties (ton) rend apart (like with a saber) the length of the landing strip (to the others, it is still only a passageway), they hardly (peevishly) raise their heads (and even that somehow self-reproachfully - caught by another possibility), imaginary (for an instant) pulled out of here - unwillingly freed from the captive’s tranquility, which they so much got used to, and to which right a way they return.

* * *

(The Real Work). In the office I work but the real work starts when I return to the apartment. I erase, shorten (vir sapit qui pauca loquitor), change that which in inexperienced morning looked (and was written) like that, and now it looks like this. Tout le monde est sage aprés le coup.

Because of the delay of such rigorous squaring of accounts with them, those are always mornings of several months ago so that, remaking them when everything has ‘irreversibly gone’ (as it is fashionably, toujours prêt, said), it looks like doing an alteration on an old coat: one can neither find all of its buttons, nor can he revive its colour.

But then - its pith is being reached, naked. (Το κλειδι).

Travaux forcés: the old fabric is turned over (the lining is turned inside out, the sleeves lengthened), everything that hangs is cut [the threads (unnecessary voices) are excised], the words are made firm (the cloth is strengthened) - in the end, that is no longer the morning so dressed up, a flash only on the collar seam is left of it.

That is why that work is the real one. ГОРСТЬ.

The regular one, the serving in the office (what an exact word that is - there someone, or something, is inevitably being served to, virtute officii), takes for itself most of the day so that in what remains of it the bills could be paid off (tout frais fait); with this (other) work a sharpening (portrayal) of the interim is executed, СОЗНАВАТЬ.

When it is sharpened so that it starts suffering from its own blade (Κοπηκα!), I put it on an indifferent disk outside, in dismembered day inside: there it is another final page of the wheat discerned from a weed.

Sch’dy (Sk’dee)

01/21-23/97

Sch’dy (pronounced Sk’dee) is an abbreviation of Schenectady, the name of a place in upstate New York.

It consists, as it can be seen, from a vowel and several consonants.

Inflexible to writing and saying it, it is almost an ill-omened pith. ОСНОВА.

Of a minimal expressiveness, its grin cannot be atomized any further. КОРА.

("What was thought obscure, perplexed, and too hard for our weak parts, will lie open to the understanding in a fair view", Locke).

Voiceless (it is only Sk’dee which is said), Sch’dy does not retreat, it doesn’t have where to, besides that it has no reason for it - it never said anything anyway.

Hastily cast, left in the first die forever, Sk’dee (written as Sch’dy) is a way of converting language into signals (signum is its bogus vice, ЗОНА).

Stiffened like Sch’dy - the signal is constant; pronounced Sk’dee - it sputters but pacifies again. (Ο κωδικας).

In either case an unyielding walnut, that name, more exactly a contraction, does not split further easily.

Everything is milled to arrive at Sch’dy.

There it hardens, steels, remoulds into a salvation (one vowel saves those many consonants) - it flashes before it digs still deeper into niggardliness, usque ad aras.

For a long time I was in doubt what name to give to this, in fact, a most ordinary chronicle.

I was changing titles, making them longer, shorter, adding subtitles; finally, I truncated all that into one word. It took pains to make it clear and sound, and it turned as - America. First of all, because all of this (what?) happened here, in it. (Even imagined, it was here where it was seen in my mind’s eye: relata refero). However, such a heading (in these times) would have been somehow too pathetic, tractable, commercial, that is overly logistically proportional, manipulatively popular (the unimprovable simple-mindedness of mesmerizing by the lightness of being, a pseudo-stance as ritual solvability of rhetorical hollowness), I reflected, exerting myself to narrow down and harden it too, even at the price of going below that basic minimum of one word, into a sub-word.

(Poca barba, poca verguenza).

Sch’dy is, therefore, that sub-word. (Un je servirai).

Locally, it is legal and exploitable, I didn’t invent it, both the regional newspapers and post-office use it.

The only remaining quandary was in how much the word America could have been identified in sub-word Sch’dy and, thus, how much this ultimate reduction would have been able to contribute to the essence without damaging the vessel in which it was contained. (Prenez garde).

And then it got solved too, what’s more - by itself. (Στην υγεια σας!).

Sch’dy became independent, stepped out of America, entered itself, shrank, started going red, overheated, and cooled down. ХРОМОТА.

A solidified lava, it now reconcilably takes care of the universal, general, and essential aloneness - vérité sans peur: haughtily wedged on the volcanic throne of singleness, it is its luminous title, the sub-word in lieu of the word is its genuine reach.

* * *

(The Submarine). It started with Captain Nemo and, in the submarine of those times, with his schism from the world, and it came to the plentitude of captains and, according to the official teaching again, their saving the world with the, so-called, nuclear submarines. (Argumentum baculinum).

Who is saving whom here, and what is that which is, actually, being protected, those who are safeguarded (presumably) know - the others, who aren’t being saved from the harm, got rid of the caring for them (as of just another impracticability, almost an oddity), in an effort to somehow survive in practical terms, ex delicto.

And when, in the case of more modest countries, it is a question of an attempt to defend their coastal, littoral waters, that is their (whatever) integrity, those larger ones (and in particular one of them) sneak their crafts of the sort wherever they can, from one sea to the other, more precisely over all the seas at the same time, as if they got confused what is theirs and what is not, although, of course, they didn’t - everything is theirs, ex abundantia.

But it is not this fact, worn out so much, which is the topic of this writing - it is only a foreword to the phenomenon of a submarine as a human’s (biological) stealthily coming upon the victim, onto his bow, en avant.

A breath is stopped (no sign’s given, nothing’s bubbling).

Firstly weak, then an increasingly stronger hint of the victim’s whereabouts is caught. (An image of trembling as the doubtfulness of waterishness, an ascertainment as το ψαρι).

Between the bottom and top it is stopped numb, there strain the eyes, ears, hands, and torpedo. (In a more serious case - a ballistic missile). Exæquo et bono.

The lip is dry, forehead sweaty: the concealed hunter and his victim (according to Baal-berith, the lord of covenant: genetically organized in the same way) - the first one falls into an avidness bent forward, the second makes his last twitch aback, to no purpose.

By the sinking, according to Archimedes (287 - 212 B.C.), as much as the victim sunk down the stillness lifted up (what starts quietly, finishes silently), the coordinates of the triumph are logged, used to anything (from Carcharodon carchiaras, the white shark, to Carcharhinidae, the requiem shark) the eyes are wiped off by the hand, rinsed with one more picture as with the appetite of a monotonously imagined but, in fact, such a fish-like act: to supplement акула’s six hundred million year old guts, beneath the fins to find СТАРОСТЬ by groping.

* * *

(The Check). In order for one to work here, he needs a security clearance - a check on him is done. Afterwards, from time to time, he is re-checked, the clearance is extended. ЗАПРОСТО.

The first working day starts (literally) with the indoctrination (indoctrinare: to instruct in doctrines, theories, beliefs or principles); the lesson is given by a full-time employee, dedicated to it. [While in those countries, in times past, they were defending themselves against that word like against a cataclysm - these (apparatchiki), from here, presumptively offended, were exclusively ascribing it (the word) to them. Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire].

To perform the check - there shows up the agent, interrogates. (He asks questions, but looks as if he already knows the answers. He waits for me to say rem acu tetigisti).

What is it, where is it, how much is it? (At which address?). Ποιανου, ποιοςαο, πότε, που?

Prudens futuri, he notes it down, in a rather small notebook. (He’ll check it out, he says). (How many teeth are up, how many down, pro confesso).

[From the notebook, they (his scribbles) are translated into a computer. The computer is connected into a network. The network is stretched tight, wrapped around his belly, tightened over his hair, yielding a robot-drawing of that which plunged itself into explaining the universal meaning, but (again) unsuccessfully - there circumnavigate various theories, often opposite one to the other: nonum prematur in annum].

He gets fidgety in his chair, he asks me if I have a question. At that, for a brief moment, he takes his sun glasses off (although we’re inside the office, he’s wearing them), rubs his eyes, straightens the tie, straightens the jacket, too.

A stocky man, a large suit. Navy blue. A trim moustach.

(L’état, c’est moi).

Subsequently, he puts his sun glasses back on. (In that way it is not seen where he looks at, he cogitates).

I don’t have a question for him.

(The question which I have, le tout ensemble, would create nothing beyond a physiologically conditioned indignation in him, besides it’s late - la critique est aisée, at l’art est difficile).

In that case, the conversation is over, he says. Over, I agree.

He leaves.

Here he is, however, the next day - he drives his car in front of the building where I reside. (I see him, by accident, through the window).

He enters the south entrance door (my apartment is at the north gate), then proceeds to the rental office to talk to a lady clerk. He checks about me. What, how, where. (Quantitatively). ОТВЕТ.

He called me, afterwards, two times. Each time, he asked me if I had a middle name: he was interested in the middle letter. (As if he knew how to deal with letters, I thought with a melancholy - so sincerely he had shown his interest).

I don’t have it anymore, I told him the second time (although, here and there, I use the initial letter of my father’s name, A, which I revealed to him the first time) - I just used it at several places in the newest diagnosis, and thus I spent it.

Diagnosis?

Yes.

What about?

About paranoia [Webster’s: oversuspiciousness, grandiose delusions, or delusions of persecution].

Why about that?

Why not?

[Questioning his questions, there it is being shaked/naked his guard (ОТВАГА) - he goes off the line excusing himself with a tiredness or with taking his wife to dinner].

(ОТВАР: Remuda de pasturaje haze bizzeros gordos).

As he didn’t call back since, the thing, it seemed, passed. Although it did not - it only kept hidden, like a clinical death, a seductive lie before the poisoned ring, ОСТРОТА.

01/24/97

I have a queen here. (Varium et mutabile semper femina).

Made from stone, she’s standing on a balcony. СКОВАННОСТЬ.

The terrace is of a violet colour, she is in yellow and white. (A snowy dress, sequined with a sunflower). (Καταλληλοςηο - a lighter anaconda).

Together with the background, onto which heavy drapes are drawn - the scene takes no more than 10 cm by 10 cm. (Behind the drapes, there could be suspected the court customs and a few intrigues).

Situated at the balcony, she looks as if she addresses someone under it. It must be the people. (СКОПОМ).

Her people are, as she is, jovial. Their relationship is that of a reserved colleagueship. (They take in good part one another). This is, it means, that happy monarchy. (Ασφαλως: it’s not that daily kingdom. A measure is known here. Even the colours match. Un bien fait n’est jamais perdu).

And who knows for how long this would have lasted if the joviality didn’t come to an end. (Valete et plaudite). While they were having fun, the subjects could afford the sparks of humorousness from the repertoire of a light clownishness. (Venenum in auro bibitur). But, in time, it was becoming increasingly heavy - having arrived at the stage of hefty silliness, they changed (transfigured) and started to shout against the queen. (To swear at her and blame her for all that circus).

("Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay", Goldsmith).

At the end (full of the self-sacrifice rage) they decided to renounce her. Having turned the kingdom into quarreling principalities, they became wicked and malevolent. They introduced the next names, expunged the previous ones. (Most of the next, of course, were previous to the previous). ОРАВА.

Anticipating that it was a phenomenon of ingratitude and malediction which was in question, the queen turned into the stone on time. Her reaction became the silence. Truth to say, she stood petrified here, next to the chair of state of the sovereign (next to a dais, covered with a canopy and highly decorated) - because of that the scene can be held in a hand, after all. (In other words, she did not abdicate, she only deadened, und so weiter). While they, once jolly people, welcomed the stone of the ex-ruler as something they could use to overbalance their own guilt. Not blaming themselves at all, incriminating only her, from their joviality there remained a mere pitiable gag. Venalis populus, venalis curia patrum.

I take the queen and return it up, by the lamp. As when it is being gotten rid of an affliction ("Many are the afflictions of the righteous", Ps. XXXIV. 19.), getting closer to the redemption beneath the lamp shade.

The Emigrants

05/13/97

"Emigración es el fracaso de las raíces. Los hombres desplazados son víctimas ecológicas*. Entre ellos y la tierra que los sustenta se ha abierto una zanja - Migration is the failure of roots. Displaced men are ecological* victims. Between them and the sustaining Earth a wedge has been driven", Ernesto Galarza; from the monument in his memory. (E.G. was born in 1905 in Mexico, emigrated as a youth to the U.S., laboured while studying all the way up to Columbia Unversity, NYC, where, in 1944, he became the first emigrant of Mexican origin to earn his doctorate in humanistic/social sciences in this country. Subsequently, in addition to pursuing his academic career and writing, he engaged himself in helping the cause and fighting for the rights of his fellow countrymen, expatriates alike). The monument is located at the corner of South Market St. & Paseo De San Antonio in downtown San Jose, CA; it consists of a chair, hat, and a long table with the above inscription on it. {*Ecology [G., oikos, house; and -logy, from logos, word], 1. The branch of biology that deals with the relations between living organisms and their environment. 2. In sociology, the relationship between the distribution of human groups with reference to material resources, and the consequent social and cultural patterns. Being the (brilliant) man he was, E.G. surely meant both of the meanings}.

By (e)migrating, an irrevocableness is expressed - it is, by all means, a question of an outright degree of far-reaching. Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus - an ultimate test of voyage, mutual vindication, ПАКТ. Who stayed - he squared account with himself, who left - he’s still doing it. (By definition heretics, the gone ones were at least that - they console themselves). While the first never took pains to identify with the representation of themselves, the second, throwing a party [that is, an ethnic gathering (although their expressivenes stops still at the word ‘picnic’)], usually on some disquieting Sunday, or during a turbid (vague) holiday (as if it were to disguise a perfect number; a number equal to the sum of all its different divisors; as 28=1+2+4+7+14), flocking actually together at their wits’ end, adding (alongside the food and drink) to the general conversation about nothing the inutility of their own - wriggling during the enire gala day in some baseless (created, again, out of a blue) hope about an appeasement. It is the newcomers who, for centuries, sustain this squirming (the contraction of tradition) - the next generation (or, at the latest, the generation following the next) annuls it, while the children of the latter ones already become a part of the other tissue, having advanced to the status of voters/supporters/electors (in a word - to the status of an integral part of the constituency), or even become local politicians, or something like that, indistinguishable from definitive identification.

The emigrants’ struggle for some sort of self-identity, or even for an exclusiveness (under the condition that it, the exclusivity, didn’t contract a nausea from its own lamentableness), is, at any rate, absurd. (Graviora quædam sunt remedia periculis). Everything is re-melted in advance - it is only a question of time when the new mould is going to replace the old one. Fideli certa merces. [In rerum natura: looking in an utterly generalized way (almost philosophically), there certainly is not room for any astonishment - who wondered he stayed, who didn’t he’ll be pondering to his end, in sæcula sæculorum]. The country which was left was, in terms of organizability, often inferior to the country of the destination. Better (more efficiently) organized, the new country won over the old one exactly by means of the organization - the (very existence of the) emigration as a phenomenon is a crown proof to such a claim. (A sort of an improved de-riveter/vacuum-cleaner: the new land de-rivets/vacuums stronger than the old one rivets/collects. Siste viator!). In the old country the things could have been in this way and in that way, in the new one -only in this way. (In the ex-country improvisation was permissible too, in the new one the regularity and order are only allowed. Pro rege, lege, et grege). If it exists (and it does), the so-called emigrants’ anguish of heart is articulated sadly and miserably - (as at that picnic) it is reduced to the futility and, often, a kitsch. [Eventual sorrowfulness for that which was left is being relativized and faded away - tomorrow already, like sadness in the hood, it vanishes before this (into which, like into an unwilling over-doing, they came), then suspiciously cracks, ВЕТЕРОК]. The emigrants’ radio and TV shows, as well as their press, are mainly worthless and most often illiterate. Their owners/hosts are practitioners of all kinds of stupidity or else of an upstart tractableness. (ГРАМОТА. A wise word is seldom heard or read although, certainly, that is not an emigrants’ exclusiveness. Carpe diem. Γκαρσον!). (Ethnography: a single-valued state of a multi-valued state, its brooch). Ipsissima verba: the language of the ex-country is being disfigured and, in time, completely lost. By loosing the mother-tongue, vivida vis animi, the crown and essence of the assurance and the vow (identity) of a being, the original country is lost irrevocably. (In the best case, it turns into uncorroborated sophisticalness, as a logical blend). The disobedience to the system there [so characteristic of the unnatural anger, that is, the intellectual fad of the, so-called (not any longer found around) dissidents] metamorphoses into the obedience towards the system here (although, in truth, sometimes culminates into a late repentance) - the rules of the new surrounding are followed as carefully and enthusiastically as the old ones were evaded and not respected.

Through the unbribable time, thrown under the grindstone of dissimilar customs, apprehensions and, certainly, the same (universal) vacuousness [only covered with a greater lack of time (КРАТКОСТЬ), with its fallaciously glittering incrustation], besides the inevitable obedience and prescribed functioning, the institution of emigration can lead to a definitive flounder. It can happen, namely, that a part of the ex-country be bombed (say, using more than 4000 sorties) by the country (countries) where the emigrants from the bombed country happened to have emigrated to, and - nothing’s changed! The emigrants still live in the same emigration, some with an additional disdain towards themselves, the majority with not even that - living in the same, orderly way, as before.

The trimness of the habitation is what’s left to them as they came for it only. [Some of them, it is possible if not sure, have identified with the new country more than they did not separate from the old one, but that is only a variation on the theme - not its spine. After all, the history (besides the collecting and sending the relief help) offers other examples as well: mass responses of the emigrants (enlisting in defensive units boarded for the old home) during the times of attacks on their original country. Vivit post funera virtus. The isolated cases of honour, lonely departures to the front line, besides being reflections of personal greatness, mirror the collective stumble].

However, as each tidiness comforts itself with an anaesthesia (and waters with oblivion), so this emigrants’ one stretched itself beyond any measure (as beyond a placable lateness) - until serving to itself its self (as its paramount stiffness), during an untenable hour of remedy, to which it was getting used for so long but never took it seriously [because it (the orderliness) comes for its singled-out ones (favourites) only when their ire subsides]. Having served themselves with reconcilableness as with the futility of their wrath, the emigrants, including the writer of these lines, increasingly (and finally - from them themselves) emigrate: so much emigrated, they do not give a sign of their presence anymore (ОТРЫВ: here - they care about nothing and nobody, there - nothing and nobody cares about them), having changed everything they changed nothing, they only bent a bit more over the empty page of the universal stay of ex-heretic in a soothed magma - a deserved circle of seething of the split-up being has been, by that, brought into a staggered order, the same one whose farinaceous state was so natural to them, and now is only their vacuous cudgel.

The Vanquished And The Vanquishers:
A Prolegomenon For Contralto And Choir

07/11/97

The vanquished and the vanguishers: a momentary delusion, or the only certainty? (Vincit qui patitur).

That this is all an illusion, there wish the vanquished ones - the vanquishers do not pay their attention to anything which is not doubtless.

While the defeated ones comfort themselves with an illusiveness (nothing is as it seems that it is - η τραγωδια), the surety of the triumph is being mounted on the victors’ mast: the obviousness of the circumstances is such that any blurred, that is a neglectful (consolatory for the vanquished) comment is inadequate - scholarly empty or rudely full: it’s worthless.

A skirmish (lack of a skirmish) yielded the result which afflicts the defeated and cheers up the victors - because of that the former complain and rant, the latter gloat. (ЗАПАС, for both). [The entire principle of nature in such a small room, and yet with a prescribed density: neither the vanquished commit mass suicide (only sporadically, here and there) nor do the vanquishers stop tolling the victorious bell. “World this is tyrannous to a tyrant / Not to mention to a good-hearted soul”, Петар Петровић Његош, ‘The Mountain Wreath’, verses 2499-500].

The defeated, mainly, fought between themselves (the victors, indeed, bombed the less defeated ones whenever it was necessary - so that all would be defeated the same).

Among some of the vanquished hardly a shot was fired, among others there blazed up a whole war - almost none of them bear the vanquisher a grudge: the majority of the defeated compete in paying respects to the victor and transiting into its military organization! Such dissolution and chaos in the heads of vanquished ones haven’t been seen for a long time, anno urbis conditæ.

But, it looks like the minority of the defeated ones are still not giving in. The vanquishers are infuriated because of that; they try to finish them too. In doing that, they (the victors) are trying their best (deus ex machina: not bringing into question, of course, the skilful artificiality of the pita-bread-like category such as morals, this time either) how to present the agression, occupation, and predatoriness as peace keeping. (Dieu et mon droit). The sauciness and impudence instruct them to bring all this to a close so that they could recover their breath deeply, to the end, like a wild hog: as if the primary wreck of the world is not pertly yawning without them already. (In contrast to them, who want it in its entirety, even Satan asked only to share the power: "In the vast heavenly plains / I ask that our rule be divided / That fallen heavens be lifted / That Nature be reimbursed with the first of the laws / That (the two of) us be given the ultimate authority / To pride ourselves with it and aggrandize / Each in his own sky”, П. П. Његош, ‘The Rays of Microcosm’, IV, 155-60).

Thus, in this course of theirs, in these farcial days, dissatisfied with their (more than a reasonable) victory, they landed their helicopters among the (still unfinished) vanquished ones and, at a close range, shot and killed one of them who, according to the customs there, barred himself in front of them (frangas, non flectes), and took the other one away, to put him on trial (in their court, of course) because he didn’t listen to them either. They even said that they’re going to continue with that, until the minority in question starts to think like the majority of the defeated ones, that is, in the way in which the victors told them to think. Cantate Domino.

As from any point of such a sourcing, from this one too there originate two possibilities [until the third one, (negotiations, ХВОРОСТ) reduces them to the banality. Castello che dà orecchia si vuol rendere]. In so far all the vanquished ones would in the end start to think as the vanquishers ordered them to do (gens de même famille), there would be nothing left of the eccentricity, while from the full-wind sailing (into, of course, an obsolete sensibility, but also into the cultural supplement as the axis of the world, from a declaration into an act - gaudium certaminis) there would remain for them a hike into (their guides’) subculture as an onomatopoeia of the, so-called, free-market (idée fixe), under the, so-named, Alliance sail (pulled tight by the instruction: pax vobiscum) - a trek uniform and predictable, gifted with canine eyes of dutiful solidity; in as much, however, a different thinking is sustained, the world is going to shake again, as always hitherto when the roles of vanquished and vanquishers were swapping over so that the white dispassionateness of the anaesthetized middle (of a peaceable, middle-of-the-road provenience) would emotionlessly flake through the contralto (countertenor) of a frail mulatto lady songster in a chorale piece of an attuned sentence (alike this one) of the mobilizing rhythm (retoucher pulse): a certain kind of a war-like exclamation of an aghast animal exposed constantly to the extreme swings between the tidy pliability (unbearable humbleness) of the dishonorable epoch (alto: alto, alto, alto) and the agitated resistance of the honorable one (contra: contra, contra, contra), until it enters itself to win. Vincit qui se vincit.

The Author’s Explication

This book is about how, having found myself in the place whose name it bears and lacking party to talk to for the reasons explained in it, I conversed with myself.

This is that conversation - a diary, or rather a chronicle: a portrayal of the days caught in a sudden attack, that is, written in the, so-called, real time, formally subjugated to a scrutiny without changing the authenticity that is holography that is cavity of the space of a direct moment, soothing them a little perhaps, because of the tolerability, concern for the reader, global equilibrium.

The reason for the abundance of the brackets in the text is, therefore, in the existence of the two voices: the outer one, outside of the parentheses, which portrays, claims, constructs and knits, and the inner one (inside the brackets, as now is the case), which opposes or approves, interlaces or unweaves, reduces to rubble or repairs. When it keeps silent - it sleeps, or wordlessly agrees with the first one. (Here it is, awaken - it reports again).

That is how, in two voices, there talks each lone man. The difference between their talks is in what every one of them says while listening, or more exactly - what he hears and how he answers. What I heard and answered is written in this, a classical novel about the disrepair of the solution and the necessity of struggle, about the strike as a momentary appeasement, about departure into the self for the closing sword.

Besides the occurences and characters borne witness by the Mythology, the "Sch’dy (Sk’dee)" contains a number of foreign expressions, words and idioms - all obtained/quoted mainly from a Webster’s dictionary. Most of them are taken from the least dangerous (dead), Latin language, but some of them are cited from the dangerous (live) languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Russian. Its skeleton, lungs, as well as its pipe (of both peace and war) are Serbian: the warfare ring of smoke - dust of Balkan’s organism; Ловћен - eyes of vertebrae; Његош as the funnel of Драгачево’s trumpet.

The Mythology imposed itself by a mere comparison with both the traditional and modern outcomes of human society: Religion and Politics - so benevolent and, at the same time, so faithfully determining (in truth, also so momentously dear, primordially comforting - neglecting the truculence of interminable moment) spiritual-social results of human communities (still clannish, archaic), as the contributions of these here, Earth’s voices to the polyphony of the cosmic collectivity, a phenomenological consequence of an incontestable, and thus ruthless marvel.

As with respect to the foreign words/expressions/phrases, that is, regarding the taking in and, in general, the presence of the non-mother-tongue, the objective was to, before all, call attention to the relativity of the symbolic/agreed-to/localized representation of notions and objects (which every language, by its very nature, and by the restrictiveness of the only, exclusive subject within the mechansim of deliberation, reverie and vigilance, is) and, with that, to signify the linguistic fragility, the restraining autonomy of each particular attempt to articulate generality, that is, universality, that is, a sweeping statement which, certainly, surpasses every individual language [and all the languages together, given that they cast a restricted set of tools with respect to the limitlessness of the surrounding upon which they’re trying, with more or less success (being unable to do it fully, to the end), to perform the portraying-cognitive operation], but there also was a goal to modulate the rhythm, to split the echo and complete the ornamental braid of the thought-sentence by enhancing expressiveness, utilizing jargon, obsoleteness, vernacularism (dialect), traditional phrase and not everyday’s parlance, and filtering the result through the personal mannerism and oddity into an idiosyncratic unusualness, singularity and paucity.

Annexed is the translation/elucidation of those foreign words and expressions for which this was not done in the text itself, at the place of use.

М. Г., Wat., July 27, 1998 - March 23, 1999

Epilogue

Paradoxically, as it is a question of chronicle/diary writings, a larger part of this manuscript is timeless (in the sense of being independent of time, applicable to any of its shifts). Given that it is not a function of time, an epilogue to that part is the part itself: neither confirmation nor disavowal (temporal categories) thrive in it, that which misleadingly grows - is a recipe for a circle.

However, to the other, smaller part, in tandem with time as with a death sentence, the epilogue serves as the last chance: that which the lesser portion guessed right - it guessed right; that which it didn’t - hit back; with these, subsequent words, it pulls itself off from the plunge.

It (the smaller part of this writing) rightfully conjectured, therefore, the intolerability of things, but not the names of all of its transformers, the breakers of the said unendurableness: neither the names of individuals, nor of the cities/towns. Forlorn by moment, by the fragmentariness of day, by the chilliness of dawn, it even arrayed them on the wrong side, enunciated them erroneously.

The names of the people and places in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia who, since March 24, 1999, over this world are raising that one (above the ruins of morals the hub of a subsistence, above the necrophilism the sound of a bone trumpet, bridging into the Sky by soaring from the Earth) we all now know, we who are in the shadows of those giants of the spirit.

It remains for me to bow to them, it remains for them to let me into their starship, as full pages would let empty dot.

Март Горски,

After completing the original manuscript in the Serbian language slightly earlier, on November 11, 1999 (exactly four years since the work started) it occurred to me to translate it into English.

It was arduous work, in part because of the non-trivial text of the original, and partly because of the fact that it is more difficult to translate from the mother tongue than into it.

Nevertheless, when now, in mid-May of 2000, after the job has been concluded, a fleeting look falls on it, a kind of indispensability between this and the original labor becomes apparent. As if they could be considered a single exertion, only in two phases.

Comparing to the four years it took to write the original, and taking into account the obviousness of the actual time that the original spans over, its (English) counterpart still looks somehow accelerated, as if it took less of everything which the original consists of. But it didn’t - in fact, some (although only a few) sentences were added to this translation.

There arose then a question of how to explain the phenomenon (besides telling that literally every day’s and a good part of nights’ drudgery was needed to get to this point).

And, like the dilemma, which the title of this book had to get over with, got resolved, the solution to the question came by itself in that

The work on the English version of this book was greatly helped by those to whom the original was dedicated (R.,B.,S.&M.), and would have not been possible to bring to an end without the innate contribution of the youngest of them, Мира Л. (16).

М.Г.,

W., May 15, 2000

GLOSSARY

Key: (L.)=Latin, (Hind.)=Hindu, (Sanskr.)=Sanskrit, (G.)=Greek, (R.)=Russian, (I.)=Italian,

(S.)=Spanish, (N.)=German, (F.)=French

à bras ouverts [F.], with open arms.

A capite ad calcem [L.], From head to heel.

A che vuole, non mancano modi [I.], Where there’s a will there’s a way.

À couvert [F.], Under cover; masked.

a die [L.], from that day.

à fleur d’eau [F.], on a level with the water.

à huis clos [F.], secretly; with closed doors.

À l’abri [F.], Under shelter.

à la carte [F.], according to the bill of fare at table.

à la dérobée [F.], by stealth.

à main armée [F.], by force of arms.

à pas de géant [F.], with a giant’s stride.

A posse ad esse [L.], From possibility to reality.

a prima vista [I.], at first sight.

A verbis ad verbera [L.], From words to blows.

a vostra salute [I.], to your healt.

à votre santé [F.], to your healt.

a vuestra salud [S.], to your healt.

Ab extra [L.], From without.

ab imo pectore [L.], from the bottom of the heart.

Ab incunabulis [L.], From the cradle.

ab initio [L.], from the beginning.

ab intra [L.], from within.

ab origine [L.], from the origin.

ab ovo [L.], from the egg; from the beginning.

ab ovo usque ad mala [L.], from the eggs to the apples (as in Roman banquets); from beginning to end.

abdomen [L.], in higher vertebrates, the belly; in insects, the posterior part of the body.

abrégé [F.], an abridgment.

Absit invidia [L.], Let there be no ill-will; envy apart.

Absit omen [L.], May this not prove of (evil) omen.

Ad astra per aspera [L.], To the stars through hardship.

ad captandum vulgus [L.], to attract or please the rabble.

Ad finem [L.], To the end.

Ad gustum [L.], To one’s taste.

Ad internecionem [L.], To extermination.

ad libitum [L.], at pleasure.

Ad majorem Dei gloriam [L.], For the greater glory of God.

Ad referendum? [L.], For further consideration?

Ad rem [L.], To the purpose; to the point.

Aσφαλως [G.], Sure; certain.

Adorer le veau d’or [F.], To worship the golden calf.

æquo animo [L.], with an equal mind; with equanimity.

ага [R.], Yes; aha.

Age quod agis [L.], Attend to what you are about.

Agnus Dei [L.], 1. Lamb of God. 2. A medallion of wax with the figure of a lamb, talisman. 3. The Anglican anthem beginning with these words.

Agnus Scythicus [L.], Scythian lamb.

ai ai [G.], Cries of sorrow.

aide toi, et le ciel t’aidera [F.], help yourself, and heaven will help you.

акула [R.], shark.

al fresco [I.], in the open air; cool.

alarius [L.], on the wing.

albesco [L.], becoming white; dawn.

albidus [L.], white.

alere flammam [L.], to feed the flame.

Alhambra [S.], A fortress/palace erected near Granada in XIII/XIV century.

Allez-vous-en! [F.], Away with you!

Almagest [L. Almageste], 1. A vast work on astronomy/geography compiled by C. Ptolemy c. 150 A.D. 2. Any work like this on astrology/alchemy, etc.

altaria [L.], altars; altar-top.

alter ego [L.], another self.

Alter idem [L.], Another exactly similar.

Alto-rilievo [I.], Sculpture in which the figures project from a background by half their thickness or more. High relief.

altus [L.], high, deep, profound.

ama [L.], a vessel for mixing and storing wine. Used for pouring the wine for the Eucharistic service. (See under Eucharistia).

Amar y saber no puede ser [S.], No one can love and also be wise.

amatorius [L.], of love, amorously.

âme de buoe [F.], a soul of mud.

amour propre [F.], self-love; vanity.

anagram [L. anagramma], a game of making words by changing or adding letters.

anakoinωση [G.], announcement.

Anas obscura [L.], An extinct swimming bird.

Animo et fide [L.], With courage and confidence.

anno ætatis suæ [L.], in the year of his or her age.

anno Domini [L.], in the year of our Lord.

ano urbis conditæ [L.], in the year from the time Rome was founded (753 B.C.).

ante cibum [L.], before nourishment.

antelucanus [L.], before dawn.

antemeridianus [L.], before noon.

antikeσ [G.], antiques.

antocularis [L.], the branched, deciduous horn of any animal of the deer family.

антракт [R.], interval.

апагореyетаi η eiσoδoσ [G.], No entry.

aperçu [F.], a general sketch or survey.

aphasia [L.], a total or partial loss of the power of using or understanding words, usually caused by brain disease or injury.

Apis [L.], 1. A genus of insects of the order of Hymenoptera, including the honeybee. 2. A divine bull, in supposed connection with the God Ptah.

apokryphos [G.], hidden.

apostates [G.], a runaway, deserter; (one who forsakes his religion for another).

Apotheosis [G.], 1. A deification. 2. An honoring or glorification of any kind. 3. A glorified ideal.

aqua pura [L.], pure or distilled water.

aqua tofana [L.], A liquid poison containing arsenic, prepared in the XVII century, by an Italian woman named Tofana.

aqua vitae [L.], 1. Water of life. 2. Alcohol. 3. Brandy.

Aquarius [L.], 1. A large constellation, outlining a man pouring water from a container in his right hand. 2. 11^th sign of Zodiac.

arabesco [F. arabesque], 1. An Arabian design, painted or carved in low relief. 2. A position in ballet dancing. 3. A short composition, in music.

arbiter elegantiarum [L.], a judge or supreme authority in matters of taste.

Arcadia [L.], 1. A district of Greece, whose people were noted for simplicity and contentment. 2. Any place where rural simplicity and happiness prevails.

αργα [G.], slowly.

Argonauta [L.], Cephalopoda (see under).

argumentum adfirmatio [L.], evidence/proof declaration.

Argumentum baculinum [L.], The argument of the cudgel; brute force.

архаιоλогιкоσ хωроσ [G.], archeological site.

арка [R.], arch.

arrectis auribus [L.], with ears pricked up.

Ars longa, vita brevis [L.], Art is long, life is short.

астма [R.], asthma.

аσтynomia [G.], police station.

au naturel [F.], in the natural state.

au revoir [F.], adieu; until we meet again.

audacia [L.], daring, courage; audacity, impudence.

audiatur et altera pars [L.], let the other side also be heard.

aureolus [L.], 1. A radiance encircling the head or body as in religious paintings (of saints). 2. A reward given after death to those who have been spiritually victorious on earth.

automatus [L.], automaton, spontaneous.

Aves [L.], The class of birds, with four limbs, the two anterior being adapted for flight and called wings.

Aυαλογως [G.], Analogous, accordingly.

Aντιo [G.], Goodbye.

Bacchante [L.], A priestess of Bacchus; one who joined celebration of the feasts of Bacchus; a woman in a state of bacchanal frenzy.

Bacchus [L., G. Bakchos], The God of wine and revelry; son of Zeus (Jupiter) and Semele; called Dionysus by Greeks.

Badaud [F.], A lounger in the streets; an idler.

barathrum [L.], abyss; the lower world.

barbatus [L.], bearded, adult.

ben trovato [I.], well invented; cleverly fabricated or concocted.

Benedetto è quel male che vien solo [I.], Blessed the misfortune that comes singly.

Beneficium [L.], Benefit, favour.

bêtise [F.], stupidity; a piece of stupidity.

bibliolatreia [G.], worship or homage paid to books (usually to the Bible).

Bicephalous [L.], Having two heads.

Bon soir [F.], Good evening.

Bon vivant [F.], One fond of luxury and good living; a gourmet.

bon voyage! [F.], a good voyage (or journey) to you!

bona fide [L.], in good faith.

Borgen macht Sorgen [N.], Borrowing makes sorrowing.

Brachiopoda [L.], A class of bivalve mollusks with two armlike parts, one on each side of the mouth, which they can protrude and withdraw.

bravado [S.], pretended courage or defiant confidence when there is really little or none.

C’ est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre [F.], It is magnificent, but it is not war; said by a French officer as he watched the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava.

Cadit quæstio [L.], The question falls; there is no further discussion.

Cælum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt [L.], They who cross the sea change their sky but not feelings.

cæteris paribus [L.], other things, being equal.

canephora [L.], any of the girls who carried on their heads the baskets containing the implements of sacrifice.

canicula [L.], the Dog Star (Sirius).

caninus annus [L.], dog’s (canine) years.

Cantate Domino [L.], Sing unto the Lord.

Cap à pié [F.], From head to foot.

caput mortuum [L.], lit. ‘dead head’; worthless residue.

cara sposa [I.], dear wife.

carnalis [L.], sensual, bodily.

Carnivora [L.], An order of flesh-eating mammals, but also some that live on vegetable food.

Carpe diem [L.], enjoy the present day; improve the time.

Castello che dà orrechia si vuol rendere [I.], The fortress that parleys speedily surrenders.

casteria [L.], rowers’ quarters.

catillus lupus [L.], small dish of (meat of) wolf.

Cato [L.], The hero of a tragedy by Addison. He commited suicide to avoid falling into Caesar’s hands.

catonium [L.], the lower world.

causa prima [L., I.], first reason.

Cavendo tutus [L.], Safe by using caution.

Ce n’est pas être bien aise que de rire [F.], Laughing is not always a sign that the mind is at ease.

cellula [L.], little room.

cenotaphium [L.], an empty tomb, erected in honour of some deceased person, buried elsewhere. (A Cenotaph in Westminster Abbey).

Cephalopoda [G.], The highest class of mollusks (Mollusca). Crab, lobster. Nautilus and Argonaut are the subclasses.

cerebellum [L.], the part of the brain which is behind and below the cerebrum. It controls muscular movement.

cerebrum [L.], the upper, main part of the brain of vertebrates, consisting of two equal hemispheres. It controls consciousness.

Ceres [L., G. Demeter], 1. The Goddess of agriculture, the daughter of Saturn and Ops. 2. An asteroid between Jupiter and Mars.

cervix [L.], in anatomy: the back of the neck.

Chacun à son goût [F.], Every one to his taste.

Chacun tire de son coté [F.], Every one inclines to his own side.

Che sarà, sarà [I.], What will be, will be.

Chevalier d’industrie [F.], A swindling or cheating rogue; one who lives by his wits.

Chi tace confessa [I.], He who keeps silence confesses.

Cicindella campestris [L.], Coleoptera (see under). (Name of the insect in systematology).

Ci git [F.], Here lies.

cirrus [L.], 1. A lock, curl, tendril. 2. A formation of filmy, fleecy clouds, generally whitish.

cista [L.], kistë (see under).

Clarior e tenebris [L.], Brighter from darkness or obscurity.

Cloelia [L.], A Roman girl hostage, who escaped by swimming the Tiber.

coccyx [L.], a small, triangular bone at the lower end of the vertebral column.

cogito, ergo sum [L.], I think, therefore I exist.

Coleoptera [L.], An order of insects. Of four wings, two anterior are hard and not suited for flight. (Example: lady bug).

compagnon de voyage [L.], companion at journey.

compluvium [L.], impluvium (see under).

con diligenza [L.], with diligence.

Con dolore [I.], With grief; sorrowfully.

conclave [L.], room.

consilio et prudentia [L.], by wisdom and prudence.

constantia et virtute [L.], by constancy and virtue (or bravery).

consule Planco [L.], when Plancus was consul; when I was a young fellow.

contradictio in adjecto [L.], inconsistency (opposition, negation) in what is claimed.

copia verborum [L.], rich supply of words.

coram nobis [L.], before us; in our presence.

coram populo [L.], in presence of the people.

cordon bleu [F.], blue-ribbon; a cook of the highest exellence.

cornelian [L. carnelian], a chalcedony of a deep-red, flesh-red, or reddish-white colour.

cornum [L.], a cornelian (red) cherry.

Corps d’ armée [L.], The body of an army; an army corps.

Corrigenda [L.], Things to be corrected; a list of errors.

Corruptio optimi pessima [L.], A corruption of what is best is worst.

cortex [L.], 1. Bark, as of a tree. 2. In anatomy, the outer part of an internal organ; the layer of gray matter over t most of the brain.

Corvus corax [L.], An order of raven.

Cos ingeniorum [L.], A whetstone for wits.

crede quod habes, et habes [L.], believe that you have it, and you have it.

Croix rouge [F.], Red cross.

Cronium mare [L.], Northern or Saturnian sea. Arctic ocean.

culpam poena premit comes [L.], punishment follows hard on crime.

Custus morum? [L.], Guardian of morals?

d’ accord [F.], in agreement.

Dahomey [F.], A sector/part of West Africa.

Damon [L.], A goatherd in Virgil’s "Eclouges"; hence, any rustic swain. Pythias (see under).

Das Beste ist gut genug [N.], The best is good enough.

Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan [N.], The eternal-feminine draws us upwards.

De bonne grâce [F.], With good grace; willingly.

de die in diem [L.], from day to day.

de haut en bas [F.], in a contemptuous or supercilious manner.

de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis [L.], concerning all things and certain others.

de retour [F.], having come back; returned.

Deceptio visus [L.], An optical illusion.

Decies repetita placebit [L.], When ten times repeated it will still please.

Decipimur specie recti [L.], We are deceived by the show of rectitude.

Deep (Pacific) Blue [ ], Super-computer (with a multitude of parallel processors).

dégagé [F.], free; easy; unconstrained.

dei gratia [L.], by the grace of God.

delta [G.], 1. The fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. 2. Mouth of a river.

denique [L.], at last, finally.

Deo volente [L.], God willing.

dernier ressort [F.], a last resource.

detractio [L.], departure; removal.

deus [L.], god.

Deus avertat! [L.], God forbid!

deus ex machina [L.], a god out of a machine; a deity introduced to bring about the dénouement of a drama (Greek and Roman stage).

Δευ ειναι τιπоτα σοβαρο [G.], it’s nothing serious.

dexter [L.], handy, skilful.

di buona volontà sta pieno l’inferno [I.], hell is full of good intentions.

Diana [L., G. Artemus], The Goddess of the chase, of chastity, and of the moon.

Dicksonia Barometz [L.], A genus of tree ferus, covered with a woolly layer; its shape resembling a lamb.

Didus Ineptus [L.], Doudo (see under).

Dien est toujours pour les plus gros bataillons [F.], God is always on the side of the largest battalions.

Dieu et mon droit [F.], God and my right. (To God - His, to me - mine).

dignus vindice nodus [L.], a difficulty worthy of powerful intervention.

dii majorum gentium [L.], gods of the superior class (higher rank).

diodon [L.], a genus of teleostean fishes. Their jaws are not divided, but exhibit one piece of bony substance above and another below, so that they have only two teeth. Also called porcupine fish, and prickly globe fish.

Dionysia [G.], A festival in honor of Dionysus, the God of vegetation and wine.

Dios me libre de hombre de un libro [F.], God deliver me from a man of one book.

Dis [L.], Plouton (see under).

Disjecta membra [L.], Scattered remains.

domicilium domabilis [L.], tameable dwelling.

Donatus [L.], Founder of sect Donatism in North Africa in IV century. As the others, this sect considered itself as the only true church.

Doorga [Hind.], Durga (see under).

dorer la pilule [F.], to gild the pill.

dorsalis [L.], of or pertaining to the back. Pertaining to, or situated on or near the back of an animal or any organ; as a dorsal fin.

dorsum [L.], the back, toward the back.

Doudo [L.], A large bird, Didus Ineptus, now extinct, formerly found on Mauritius.

Doux yeux [F.], Soft glances.

Draco volans [L.], Draco: a northern constellation of Dragon, between the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper. Volans: a southern constellation of Flying Fish.

Dulce est desipere in loco [L.], It is pleasant to play the fool at times.

durante vita [L.], during life.

Durga [Hind.], The Amazon champion and protectress of the gods. She is represented with ten arms; also spelled Doorga.

e re nata [L.], according to the exigency.

Ecclesiasticus [L.], Of or belonging to the church. A book of proverbs in the Apocrypha, included as canonical in the Douay Bible.

ecclesiastic [L. ecclesiastes], a member of an assembly; a clergyman or priest.

ecstatic [G. ekstatikos], a state of ecstasy.

ectoderm [G. ectoderma], the outer layer of cells of an animal embryo, from which the nervous system, skin and teeth are developed.

εфαγα [G.], I ate.

Eheu! fugaces labuntur anni [L.], Alas! The fleeting years glide by.

Eχασα τo σρoμo μoν [G.], I’ve lost my way.

Eχτες [G.], Yesterday.

Εισοδοε [G.], Entrance.

ειναι επικινδυνο? [G.], Is it dangerous?

εκτος απο [G.], apart (from).

elegia [L.], elegy.

eleutheria [L.], liberty.

Elysium [L.], Elusian fields: a place assigned to virtuous people after death; a place/condition of ideal bliss/complete hapiness.

elytra [G. pl. of elytron], outer (anterior) wing sheath. Coleoptera (see under).

εμαγιε [G.], enamelled.

emendatio [L.], correction.

Empressement [F.], Promptitude; eagerness.

en avant [F.], forward.

En cueros [S.], Naked; unclothed.

en déshabillé [F.], in undress.

endoderm [G. endoderma], the inner layer of embryo cells, from which is formed the lining of the digestive tract.

en passant [F.], in passing.

en plein jour [F.], in broad day.

en rapport [F.], in harmony; in agreement .

En règle [F.], According to rules; in order.

en revanche [F.], in requital; in return.

En suite [F.], In company; in a set.

en vérité [F.], in truth; verily.

Entremets [F.], Side dishes of dainties to be eaten between the serving of the joints.

Eo nomine [L.], By that name.

Eos [G.], Dawn, daybreak. Prefix used for notions in paleontology, geology; denoting the early periods of time (Eocene).

epea pteroenta [G.], winged words.

Ephemera [G. ephēmeros], An insect of the genus Ephemera. Anything having a very short life - synonym for ephemerality.

Epicuri de grege porcus [L.], A swine from the herd of Epicurus; an Epicurean.

Epiphaneia [G.], An appearance or apparition of deity or other supernatural being.

epitome [G.], an abridgment, abstract.

epulis accumbere divum [L.], to sit down at the banquets of the gods.

erratio erratum [L.], wandering error.

ересь [R.], heresy.

Η βολτ [G.], Walk.

Η σоδα [G.], Soda (water).

Η фραση! [G.], Phrase!

η Гιουγκοσλαβια [G.], Yugoslavia.

η ιστιοπλοια [G.], sailing.

Ηλεκτрικα ειδη [G.], Electrical appliances.

Ημεροηνια λ ηξεωσ [G.], Expiry date.

Η οραοη [G.], (Eye) sight.

η ουλη [G.], scar.

Η πολυθρονα [G.], Armchair.

η πυροσβεστικη νπηρεσια [G.], a fire brigade.

ησυχια [G.], Silence.

η τραγωσια [G.], tragedy.

η υποχρεωση [G.], obligation.

et hoc genus omne [L.], and everything of the sort.

et id genus omne [L.], and everything of the kind.

Ethos [G.], 1. The objective elements in a work of art as distinguished from the subjective elements: opposed to pathos. 2. An accustomed place or habitation.

Eucharistia [L., G.], 1. Thankfulness, gratitude, the sacrifice of the Mass. 2. The sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; Holy Communion; bread and wine, used in the sacrament.

Euterpe [L.], The Muse of music.

ex abundantia [L.], out of the abundance.

ex animo [L.], heartily; sincerely.

ex capite [L.], from the head; from memory.

ex cathedra [L.], from the chair or seat of authority; with high authority.

ex delicto [L.], from the crime.

ex mera gratia [L.], through mere favor.

ex mero motu [L.], from his own impulse; from his own free-will.

Ex more [L.], According to custom.

ex necessitate rei [L.], from the necessity of the case.

ex officio [L.], by virtue of office.

ex opere operato [L.], by outward acts.

Ex pede Herculem [L.], From the foot (we recognize) a Hercules; we judge of the whole from the specimen.

ex post facto [L.], after the deed is done; retrospective.

ex professo [L.], professedly.

ex propriis [L.], from one’s own resources.

ex usu [L.], by use.

ex vi termini [L.], by the force or meaning of the term or word.

ex voto [L.], according to one’s prayer or vow.

Exæquo et bono [L.], Agreeably to what is good and right.

exceptio probat regulam [L.], the exception proves the rule.

exceptis excipiendis [L.], the due exceptions being made.

excerpta [L.], extracts.

exempla sunt odiosa [L.], examples are offensive.

Expertus metuit [L.], Having experience, he fears it.

exsisto [L.], be, exist, emerge, appear, arise.

extrait [F.], extract.

fabella [L.], short story.

fabula [L.], story, play, fable.

Facies non omnibus una [L.], All have not the same face or features.

facilitas [L.], ease, readiness.

facticius [L.], factitious, artificial, forced.

faire bonne mine [F.], to put a good face upon the matter.

Fama semper vivat [L.], May his fame endure forever.

фантазер [R.], Dreamer.

fanum [L.], sanctuary temple.

фара [R.], headlights.

фарфор [R.], china; porcelain.

Fas est et ab hoste doceri [L.], It is right to be taught even by the enemy.

фасон [R.], fashion; cut; style; manner.

Fata [L.], Three Goddesses who control human destiny: Clotho - spins the thread of life, Lachesis - determines its length, Atropos - cuts it off.

Fata obstant [L.], The Fates oppose it.

Fata viam invenient [L.], The Fates will find a way.

fatalis [L.], fateful, destined.

Faux pas [F.], A false step; a lapse in virtue.

Fax mentis incendium gloriæ [L.], The passion for glory is the torch of the mind.

februum [L.], purification.

felis [L.], cat, cat-like.

felix [L.], favourable, successful.

felluca [I.], a small, Mediterranean ship, with two or three masts, propelled by oars or lateen sails or both.

femur [L.], the thigh bone.

ferocitas [L.], aggressiveness.

Festina lente [L.], Hasten slowly.

Feu de joie [F.], A bonfire; a fire of joy.

fibula [L.], the long, thin outer bone of human leg below the knee.

fide et fiducia [L.], by fidelity and confidence.

fide et fortitudine [L.], with faith and fortitude.

fidei defensor [L.], defender of the faith.

Fideli certa merces [L.], To the faithful one reward is certain.

Finem respice [L.], Look to the end.

Finis coronat opus [L.], The end crowns the work.

flabellum [L.], a large fan, formed of feathers, ivory, and metal; carried before the Pope and other dignitaries.

flavus [L.], yellow, golden.

Flosculi sententiarum [L.], Flowers of fine thoughts.

Flux de bouche [F.], An inordinate flow of words; garrulity.

foi en tout [F.], faith in everything.

foi pour devoir [F.], faith for duty.

фон [R.], background, scene.

fons et origo [L.], the source and origin.

fortissimo [I.], in music, very loud.

фосфор [R.], phosphorus.

фрагмент [R.], fragment.

фрак [R.], tail-coat, tails.

frangas, non flectes [L.], you may break but not bend (me, us).

Froides mains, chaud amour [F.], Cold hands, warm heart.

фронт [R.], front.

Front à front [F.], Face to face.

frontal [L. frontale], in anatomy, the bone of the forehead.

Fronti nulla fides [L.], There is no trusting to appearances.

фронтон [R.], pediment (see under).

fugit irreparabile tempus [L.], irrecoverable time flies on.

Furor arma ministrat [L.], Rage provides arms.

furor loquendi [L.], a rage for speaking.

fuyez les dangers de loisir [F.], avoiding the dangers of leisure.

Gaea - Gaia - Ge [G.], The earth personified as a Goddess.

гам [R.], uproar.

гамак [R.], hammock.

Garter’s Order [ ], The highest order of British Knighthood, instituted about 1344 by Edward III, consisting of the sovereign, the Prince od Wales, and 25 knights.

gaudium certaminis [L.], the joy of conflict.

гавань [R.], Harbour.

Γεια σας [G.], Hello.

Genera [L.], Plural of Genus.

genius loci [L.], the presiding spirit or genius of the place.

gens de même famille [F.], birds of a feather.

Genus [L.], 1. A class. 2. In logic: a class of like objects or ideas. 3. In biology: the main subdivision of a family.

genus irritabile vatum [L.], the irritable race of poets.

Giovine santo, diavolo vecchio [I.], A young saint, an old devil.

Gitano [S.], A gypsy.

Γκαρσον! [G.], Waiter (garson)!

gli assenti hanno torto [I.], the absent are in the wrong.

Gloria Patri [L.], Glory to the Father.

glückliche Reise! [N.], a pleasant journey!

gnothi seauton [G.], know thyself.

Gorgon [L. Gorgonis], Stheno, Euryale and Medusa, representing ugly, terrifying or repulsive beings.

горн [R.], bugle.

горсть [R.], handful.

goutte à goutte [F.], drop by drop.

gradu diverso, via una [L.], the same road by different steps.

Gradus ad Parnassum [L.], A step to Parnassus. (Aid in writing Greek or Latin verse).

грамота [R.], Reading and writing.

grapha [Sanskr.], reaching.

γρατσουνιξω [G.], I scratch.

Gratia placendi [L.], The delight of pleasing.

Graviora quædam sunt remedia periculis [L.], Some remedies are worse than the disease.

γρηγορα [G.], quickly.

Grosse tête et peu de sens [F.], A large head and little sense.

Grus [L.], The name of a constellation.

gryphon [English. griffin], mythical monster: half eagle, half lion.

guerra al cuchillo [S.], war to the knife.

guerra cominciata, inferno scatenato [I.], war begun, hell unchained.

guerre à mort [F.], war to the death.

guerre à outrance [F.], war to the uttermost.

Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed sæpe cadendo [L.], The drop hollows the stone by frequent falling, not by force.

Gyak [Sanskr.], Yama (see under).

habitué [F.], one who is in the habit of frequenting a place.

Hades [G.], Hell. Also, Plouton’s second name.

HAE [ ], In connection with the UAV; (e.g., Predator, see under).

Hæc olim meminisse juvabit [L.], It will delight us to remember this some day.

Hannibal ad portas [L.], Hannibal before the gates; the enemy close at hand.

harpyia [L.], three hideous, filthy, winged monsters with the head and trunk of a woman and the tail, legs, and talons of a bird: they carried off the souls of the dead.

хата [R.], peasant hut.

Hebephrenia (dementia praecox) [L.], A psychosis characterized by melancholia and hallucinations.

Heu pietas! Heu prisca fides! [L.], Alas for piety! Alas for the ancient faith!

Hiatus [L.], Opening, open mouth; abyss.

hiatus valde defiendus [L.], a hiatus or deficiency much to be regretted.

hic et ubique [L.], here and everywhere.

Hic et nunc [L.], Here and now.

hinc illæ lacrimæ [L.], hence these tears.

Hodie mihi, cras tibi [L.], Mine today, yours tomorrow.

hoi polloi [G.], the rabble.

hombre de un libro [S.], a man of one book.

hominis est errare [L.], to err is human.

homo homini lupus [L.], man is a wolf to man.

homo multarum litterarum [L.], a man of great learning.

Homo sui juris [L.], A man who is his own master.

homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto [L.], I am a man; I count nothing that is human indifferent to me.

homology [G. homologia], agreement; the state of being homologous.

homophylia [G.], sameness of race.

Honi soit qui mal y pense [F.], Shame to him who thinks evil of it; evil to him who evil thinks.

Honos habet onus [L.], Honour brings responsibility.

Horae canonicae [L.], Prescribed hours for prayer; canonical hours.

horas non numero nisi serenas [L.], I number only hours of sunshine. (Motto for a sun dial).

Horresco referens [L.], I shudder as I relate.

hors d’ œuvre [F.], out of course.

hors de combat [F.], rendered unable any longer to fight.

hors de concours [F.], out of the competition.

hors de la loi [F.], in the condition of an outlaw.

hors de saison [F.], out of season.

Hôtel Dieu [F.], A hospital.

hôtel gărni [F.], a furnished lodging.

хромота [R.], lameness.

humanum est errare [L.], to err is human.

humus [L.], earth, ground.

Hunc tu Romane caveto! [L.], Roman, beware of that man!

хворост [R.], brushwood; straws.

hydria [G.], a large Greek vase, with three handles and a capacious body.

ich dien [N.], I serve.

iconoclastic [G. eikonoklan], adj - attacking established beliefs/institutions.

id genus omne [L.], all of that sort or description.

idée fixe [F.], a fixed idea.

Idiosynkrasia [G.], 1. The temperament or mental constitution peculiar to a person or group. 2. Any personal peculiarity, mannerism.

Ignoscito sæpe alteri, nunquam tibi [L.], Forgive the others, never yourself.

Ignoti nulla cupido [L.], No desire is felt for a thing unknown.

il a le diable au corps [F.], the devil is in him.

il conduit bien sa barque [F.], he steers his boat well.

Il est plus aise d’être sage pour les autres, que pour soi-même [F.], It is easier to be wise for others than for oneself.

Il faut attendre le boiteux [F.], It is necessary to wait for the truth.

Il penseroso [I.], The pensive man.

Il sent le fagot [F.], He is suspected of heresy.

Il vaut mieux tâcher d’oublier ses malheurs, que d’en parler [F.], It is better to forget one’s misfortunes, than to talk of them.

Ilias malorum [L.], An Illiad of ills; a host of evils.

Imitatores, servum pecus [L.], Imitators, a servile herd.

immedicabile vulnus [L.], an incurable wound; irreparable injury.

imo pectore [L.], from the bottom of the breast.

impari Marte [L.], with unequal military strength.

impius [L.], impious, undutiful, disloyal; wicked, unscrupulous.

impluvium [L.], roof-opening of the Roman atrium; rain-basin in the atrium.

in actu [L.], in act or reality.

in æternum [L.], forever.

in ambiguo [L.], in doubt.

In bianco [I.], In blank; in white.

in curia [L.], in court.

in foro conscientiæ [L.], before the tribunal of conscience.

in limine [L.], at the threshold.

in loco parentis [L.], in the place of a parent.

In medias res [L.], Into the midst of things.

In medio tutissimus ibis [L.], You will go safest in a middle course.

In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas [L.], In things essential unity, in things doubtful liberty, in all things charity.

in nubibus [L.], in the clouds.

In nuce [L.], In a nutshell.

In omnia paratus [L.], Prepared for all things.

In ovo, ex tacito [L.], In the egg, tacitly.

in pace [L.], in peace.

in partibus infidelium [L.], in parts belonging to infidels, or countries not adhering to the Roman Catholic fate.

In rerum natura [L.], In the nature of things.

in pleno [L.], in full.

in sæcula sæculorum [L.], for ages on ages.

In solo Deo salus [L.], In God alone is safety.

in totidem verbis [L.], in so many words.

in utramque fortunam paratus [L.], prepared for either fortune (or result).

in vacuo [L.], in empty space; in a vacuum.

incredulus odi [L.], being incredulous I cannot endure it.

Inde iræ [L.], Hence these resentments.

Index Prohibitorius [L.], A list of prohibited boks (prohibited to Roman catholics).

ingressus [L.], entrance; beginning.

inopem copia fecit [L.], abundance made him poor.

insouciant [F.], unconcerned; indifferent.

inter spem et metum [L.], betweeen hope and fear.

intertextus [L.], interwoven.

intra muros [L.], within the walls.

Intra parietes [L.], Within walls; in private.

introitus [L.], a going in; entrance.

Invita Minerva [L.], Against the will of Minerva; at variance with one’s mental capacity; without genius.

Ipsissima verba [L.], The very words.

Ir por lana y volver trasquilado [S.], To go for wool, and come back shorn.

Isis [G.], Egyptian Goddess of fertility. Represented with a cow’s horns and the sun’s disk as a crown.

Ita lex scripta [L.], Thus the law stands written.

Iüdicium [L.], Judgment.

Je vis en espoir [F.], I live in hope.

Jean Valjean [F.], A hero of the novel "Les Misérables" by Victor Hugo.

Jeu de théâtre [F.], Stage-trick; clap-trap.

Jove [L. Jovis], The chief of the Roman gods; Jupiter.

jure divino [L.], by divine law.

Jure humano [L.], By human law.

jus gladii [L.], the right of the sword.

Καλημερα [G.], Good day, good morning.

Καλο ταξιδι! [G.], Have a good trip!

канат [R.], rope; cable.

капкан [R.], Trap.

Καταλληλοςηο [G.], Suitable.

каток [R.], Skating rink; roller.

кава пота [G.], wine cellar.

Καυατε λαθος [G.], You’ve made a mistake.

Kein Kreuzer, kein Schweizer [N.], No money no Swiss.

kistë [G., L. cista], 1. A box or chest containing sacred utensils. 2. A primitive tomb made of stone slabs or hollowed out of rock.

Κινδυνοσ (θανατοτ) [G.], Danger (of death).

комета [R.], comet.

Κοπηκα! [G.], I have cut myself!

кора [R.], Bark, rind; cortex; crust.

краткость [R.], brevity.

l’ étoile du nord [F.], the star of the north.

l’affaire s’achemine [F.], the business is progressing.

l’argent [F.], money.

l’avenir [F.], the future.

l’empire des lettres [F.], the republic of letters.

L’etat, c’est moi [F.], It is I who am the state.

labellum [L.], 1. Lip. 2. Small basin.

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum [L.], It glides on, and will glide on forever.

la critique est aisée, et l’art est difficile [F.], criticism is easy, and art is difficult.

La patience est amère, mais son fruit est doux [F.], Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

La poverta è la madre di tutte le arti [I.], Poverty is the mother of all the arts.

La propriété c’est le vol [F.], Property is robbery.

lapsus calami [L.], a slip of the pen.

lapsus linguæ [L.], a slip of the tongue.

lapsus memoriæ [L.], a slip of the memory.

lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate [I.], abandon hope all ye who enter here.

laudationes eorum qui sunt ab Homero laudati [L.], praises from those who were themselves praised by Homer.

Laudum immensa cupido [L.], Insatiable desire for praise.

laus [L.], praise, approval, glory.

laus Deo [L.], praise to God.

Lavandula vera [L., I. lavanda], A kind of perennials.

le monde savant [F.], the learned world.

Le mot de l’enigme [F.], The key to the mystery.

le roi est mort, vive le roi! [F.], the king is dead, long live the king!

Le roi et l’état [F.], The king and the state.

le roi le veut [F.], the king wills it.

le tout ensemble [F.], the whole together.

Le vrai n’est pas toujours vraisemblable [F.], The truth is not always probable; truth is stranger than fiction.

Leitourgia [L.], Procession.

lèse majesté [F.], high treason.

levamen probationis [L.], relief from proving.

leve fit quod bene fertur onus [L.], the burden which is well borne becomes light.

levitas [L.], lightness, fickleness, frivolity.

lex loci [L.], the law or custom of the place.

lex non scripta [L.], unwritten law; common law.

Lex talionis [L.], The law of retaliation.

liberum arbitrium [L.], free will.

Limæ labor et mora [L.], The slow and laborious polishing of a literary composition.

Lis litem generat [L.], Strife begets strife.

litem lite resolvere [L.], to settle strife by strife, to remove one difficulty by introducing another.

Littera scripta manet [L.], The written letter remains.

Loci communes [L.], Common places.

locos y niños dicen la verdad [S.], fools and children speak the truth.

Locum tenens [L.], One occupying the place of another; a substitute.

locus classicus [L.], a classical passage.

locus sigilli [L.], the place of the seal on a document.

longe aberrat scopo [L.], he goes far from the mark.

loyal devoir [L.], loyal duty.

Loyauté n’a honte [F.], Loyalty has no shame.

Lucidus ordo [L.], A lucid arrangement.

Lucus a non lucendo [L.], Used as a typical of an absurd derivation or explanataion: e.g., lucus (grove, wood) wrongly used as lucere (shine, glare).

lumbus [L.], lower part of the back.

Magna Cum Laude [L.], With great praise: phrase used to signify graduation with high honors from a university or college.

Magnas inter opes inops [L.], Poor in the midst of great wealth.

magnus [L.], great, large, big.

maître des hautes œuvres [F.], an executioner; a hangman.

malar [L. mala], the cheekbone.

Malentendu [F.], Misunderstood; poorly conceived.

malgré soi [F.], in spite of himself.

Mali principii malus finis [L.], Bad beginnings have bad endings.

Manes [L.], Ghosts; shades of the dead; the lower world; bodily remains.

Manet alta mente repostrum [L.], It remains deeply fixed in the mind.

mare clausum [L.], a closed sea; bay.

mare interum [L.], Tyrrhenian Sea.

mare nostrum [L.], Mediterranean (Sea).

mare superum [L.], Adriatic Sea.

Mars gravior sub pace latet [L.], A severer war lies hidden under peace.

mastoid [L.], designating, of, or near a projection of the temporal bone behind the ear.

materiam superabit opus [L.], the workmanship will prove superior to the material.

mauvais goût [F.], bad taste.

mauvaise honte [F.], false modesty.

maximus in minimis [L.], very great in trifles.

Me judice [L.], I being judge.

mediocria firma [L.], moderate or middle things are surest.

medius fidius [L.], by Heaven!.

Mens sibi conscia recti [L.], A mind conscious of its own rectitude.

Mesmerism [F.], Hypnotism.

mesoderm [G. mesos - mid, dermo - (to) skin], The middle germ layer of an embryo, from which the muscular, vascular, and connective tissues develop; the mesoblast.

местность [R.], locality, area.

metatarsus [L.], the part of the foot, especially the five bones between the ankle and toes.

meum et tuum [L.], mine and thine.

Μετριοςαο [G.], Medium.

Μενω εσω [G.], I live (reside, stay) here.

Μη κλεινετε την εισοδο [G.], Do not obstruct entrance.

Μην πατατε το πρασινο [G.], Keep off the grass.

Microscopium [L.], The name of a constellation.

mihi cura futuri [L.], my care is for the future.

Milvulus govinda [L.], opossum (see under).

mirabile dictu [L.], wonderful to relate.

mirabile visu [L.], wonderful to see.

Mirabilia [L.], Wonderful, extraordinary.

mirum in modum [L.], in a wonderful manner.

modo et forma [L.], in manner and form.

modus operandi [L.], manner of working.

mole ruit sua [L.], it falls in ruins by its own weight.

molia tempora fandi [L.], times favorable for speaking.

mors janua vitæ [L.], death is the gate of eternal life.

mors omnibus communis [L.], death is common to all.

mot du guet [F.], a watchword.

mots d’usage [F.], words in common use.

Motu proprio [L.], Of his own accord.

мозг [R.], brain.

Μπορειτε να το τυλιξετε, παρακαλω? [G.], Can you wrap it, please?

Mucho en el suelo, poco en el cielo [S.], Much on earth, little in heaven.

Multum in parvo [L.], Much in little.

Mundus vult decipi [L.], The world wishes to be deceived.

Mutuus consensus [L.], Mutual consent.

n’est-ce pas? [F.], is it not so?

n’importe [F.], it matters not.

нагнетать [R.], compress; supercharge.

нагота [R.], nakedness, nudity.

нахватать [R.], to pick up, get hold of.

наотрез [R.], flatly, point-blank.

наперсток [R.], thimble.

напоказ [R.], for show.

напор [R.], pressure.

насыпать [R.], pour in, fill; spread; heap up.

наcыпь [R.], embankment.

natale solum [L.], native soil.

натереть [R.], polish(ed); chafe; grate; rub on.

Natura lo fece, e poi ruppe la stampa [I.], Nature made him, and then broke the mould.

Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret [L.], Though you drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet will she ever return.

Nautilus [L.], Cephalopoda (see under).

навык [R.], experience, skill.

ne fronti crede [L.], trust not to appearances.

ne Jupiter quidem omnibus placet [L.], not even Jupiter pleases everybody.

Ne puero gladium [L.], Intrust not a boy with a sword.

Ne tentes, aut perfice [L.], Either attempt it not or succeed.

nec pluribus impar [L.], not an unequal match for numbers.

négligé [F.], morning dress; an easy loose dress.

нега [R.], bliss; luxury.

nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit [L.], no one is wise at all times.

nemo repente fuit turpissimus [L.], no one ever became a villain in an instant.

Nemo solus sapit [L.], No one is wise alone (with no person to consult).

Νερικοςηο [G.], Unfinished, partial.

netteté [F.], neatness.

ni firmes carta que no leas, ni bebas agua que no veas [S.], Never sign a paper you have not read, nor drink water you have not examined.

ni l’un ni l’autre [F.], neither the one nor the other.

Niaserie [F.], Silliness; simplicity.

Nicht wahr? [N.], Is it not so? (Am I not right?).

nihil ad rem [L.], nothing to the point.

Nil conscire sibi nulla pallescere culpa [L.], To be conscious of no fault, and to turn pale at no accusation.

nil desperandum [L.], there is no reason for despair.

ныне [R.], Now, today.

Nimium ne crede colori [L.], Trust not too much to looks (or externals).

Nitor in adversum [L.], (The majority is always) against opposition, (lit. I strive against opposition).

No es oro todo lo quo reluce [S.], All is not gold that glistens.

no hay cerradura si es de oro la ganzúa [S.], there is no lock that a golden key will not open.

nobilitas sola est atque unica virtus [L.], virtue is the true and only nobility.

nocturnus [L.], nocturnal; night.

Nolens volens [L.], Willing or unwilling.

noli irritare leones [L.], do not irritate lions.

noli me tangere [L.], touch me not.

Nolo episcopari [L.], I do not wish to be made a bishop.

non libet [L.], it does not please me.

Non multa, sed multum [L.], Not many things but much.

Non nostrum est tantas componere lites [L.], It is not for us to settle such weighty disputes.

non quis, sed quid [L.], not who but what, not the person but the deed.

Non sibi, sed omnibus [L.], Not for the self, but for all.

nonum prematur in annum [L.], let it be kept back (from publication) till the ninth year.

нора [R.], burrow, hole.

norma [L.], an authoritative standard, norm.

nosce te ipsum [L.], know thyself.

notio [L.], idea; cognisance.

новость [R.], news.

нрав [R.], disposition, temper.

nugæ canoræ [L.], melodious trifles.

nulla dies sine linea [L.], not a day without a line; no day without something done.

Nulla nuova, buona nuova [I.], No news is good news.

Nunquam minus solus, quam cum solus [L.], Never less alone than when alone.

Obprobrum [L. opprobrium], Disgrace, reproach.

O! si sic omnia [L.], O! if all things were so.

occipital [L. occiput], the back part of the head or skull.

occultator [L.], hider.

occultus [L.], secret, hiding.

occulto [L.], conceal, secret.

Oedipus [G.], The king of Thebes who answered the riddle of the Sphinx at the entrance gates of his kingdom.

о φακος [G.], torch.

Ofrecer mucho especie es de negar [S.], To offer much is a kind of denial.

Ogni bottega ha la sua malizia [I.], Every shop has its tricks; tricks in all trades.

охапка [R.], armful.

Ohe! jam satis [L.], Hold! enough.

Ohne Hast, aber ohne Rast [N.], Without haste, but without rest.

о συνδεσμος [G.], ligament.

о χρονος [G.], time, year.

О καινοριος χρονος [G.], New Year.

о καθρεφτης [G.], mirror.

О κωδικας [G.], Code.

olet lucernam [L.], it smells of the lamp (‘the midnight oil’); it is a labored production.

Omen faustum [L.], A favourable omen.

Omne solum forti patria [L.], Every soil is a brave man’s country.

omnia ad Dei gloriam [L.], all things for the glory of God.

omnia bona bonis [L.], all things are good to the good.

omnia vincit labor [L.], labor overcomes all things.

опасность [R.], danger; peril.

operarius [L.], workman.

ophidion [G.], a snake or serpent.

опыт [R.], experiment; experience.

opossum [L.], A small, nocturnal animal, 15 in long. Tree-dwelling, it pretends to be dead when trapped.

О πυευμοναζ[G.], Lungs.

oraculum ordinatim [L.], orderly prophecy.

oratio [L.], speech.

орава [R.], Crowd, horde.

Orbicularis oculi [L.], Eye muscles.

Orcus [L.], Plouton (see under).

Ore rotundo [L.], With round full voice.

Οριο ταχντηταζ [G.], Speed limit.

οροφοσ [G.], floor.

оса [R.], wasp.

основа [R.], Base, basis, foundation.

осока [R.], sedge.

os sacrum [L.], The sacred bone; a thick, triangular bone situated at the lower end of the spinal column.

остаток [R.], remainder; rest; residue; pl remains; leftovers.

Ο τοιχοζ [G.], Wall.

острота [R.], witticism, joke.

ο τενωνας [G.], tendon; muscle.

otium [L.], leisure; idleness, retirement; peace, quiet.

отрыв [R.], tearing off; alienation, isolation.

оттенок [R.], shade, nuance; tint.

оттого [R.], that is why.

отвага [R.], courage, bravery.

отвар [R.], Broth; decoction.

ответ [R.], Answer.

ouï-dire [F.], hearsay.

о ναος [G.], temple.

ουδεν ΠΡΟΣ δηλωση [G.], nothing to declare.

ovatio [L.], minor triumph.

palanka [Turkish.], a permanent intrenched camp to protect a frontier fort; a provincial town.

пакт [R.], pact.

Panathenaea [G.], The festival held in honor of Athena, the Greek Goddess of wisdom, skills, and warfare; identified by the Romans with Minerva.

пантера [R.], Panther.

par ci par là [F.], here and there.

par complaisance [F.], by complaisance.

par manière d’acquit [F.], for form’s sake; by way of acquittal.

par privilège [F.], by privilege; license.

parfaitement bien [F.], perfectly well.

parietal [L.], a parietal bone: either of the two bones between the frontal and occipital bones, forming part of the top and sides of the skull .

paritur pax bello [L.], peace is produced by war.

pars pro toto [L.], part for the whole.

pas à pas on va bien loin [F.], step by step one goes a long way.

Пасха [R.], Easter; Passover.

Παστα [G.], Cake.

pastoricius [L.], shepherd’s.

patella [L.], lit. dish. The joint bone in knee.

Pathos [G.], 1. The personal or emotional element in art: opposed to Ethos (see under). 2. Pity, sorrow, sympathy.

patience passe science [F.], patience surpasses knowledge.

pax vobiscum [L.], peace be with you.

pediment [L.], the low, triangular mass resembling a gable, at the end of buildings in the Greek style.

пехота [R.], infantry, foot.

per ambages [L.], by circuitous way; hence, by allegory; figuratively; metaphorically.

пересказ [R.], Telling; exposition.

переспать [R.], (To) oversleep; spend the night.

перевес [R.], preponderance; advantage.

перрон [R.], platform.

перстень [R.], ring.

пестрота [R.], diversity of colours; diversity.

Petal [L.], Any of the component parts, or leaves, of a corolla.

πεντεηιση [G.], thirty past five.

phalanges [L.], The bones of toes.

pius [L.], holy, godly.

Placenta [L.], lit. a cake. A vascular organ within the uterus, connected to the fetus by the umbilical cord.

planta [L.], 1. A young tree, vine, shrub, or herb suitable for planting. 2. Any of a kingdom (Plantae) of living beings typically lacking locomotive movement or obvious nervous or sensory organs.

Platysma [L.], The neck muscles.

Pleonasmus [L.], Redundancy of words in speaking and writing; the use of more words than necessary in expressing ideas.

Plouton [G.], The God ruling over the lower world. Also known as Hades [G.], Orcus, Tartarus, Dis [L.].

Poca barba, poca verguneza [S.], Little beard, little shame.

Ποιανου, ποιοςαο, ποτε, πον? [G.], Whose, which, when, where?

показ [R.], showing, demonstration.

покров [R.], cover.

помеха [R.], hindrance; obstacle.

поперек [R.], across.

попеременно [R.], in turns.

поры [R.], pores.

порог [R.], threshold.

possunt quia posse videntur [L.], they are able because they think they are.

постановка [R.], arrangement; putting, placing.

post cibum [L.], after nourishment.

Post cineres gloria venit [L.], After death comes glory.

Post nubila jubila [L.], After sorrow joy.

Post nubila Phœbus [L.], After clouds comes Phœbus, or the sun.

потеха [R.], fun.

Ποτε εγινε? [G.], When did it happen?

потеть [R.], mist over; sweat.

Πον βγαζει αυτος о δρομοζ? [G.], Where does this road lead to?

Πον ειμαστε? [G.], Where are we?

позыв [R.], inclination.

позвонок [R.], vertebra.

praemolestia [L.], apprehension.

praemonitus [L.], premonition.

прах [R.], dust; remains.

pratum pratulum [L.], (small) meadow; grass.

правота [R.], rightness; innocence.

Predator [ ], synonyms: Thief, Bandit, Pilferer, Looter, Plunderer, Pillager, Poacher, Raider, Wrecker.

Prenez garde [F.], Beware; look out.

Prêt d’accomplir [F.], Ready to accomplish.

Prima facie Primianist [L.], At a glance (at a first sight) - a Primianist, one of the Donatists who followed Primianus, the bishop of Carthage, in the fouth century.

Primula Auricula [L.], The Primrose family.

primus [L.], first, foremost.

primulus [L.], very first.

principium [L.], beginning, origin.

pristinus [L.], former, original; of yesterday.

прыть [R.], energy; speed.

pro confesso [L.], as if conceded.

pro Deo et ecclesia [L.], for God and the church.

pro forma [L.], for the sake of form.

Pro rege, lege, et grege [L.], For the king, the law, and the people.

procul, O procul este, profani! [L.], far, far hence, O ye profane!

profundus [L.], deep; vast; infernal.

прогресс [R.], progress.

прок [R.], Use, benefit.

проказа [R.], mischief, prank.

Propriétaire [F.], An owner or proprietor.

Prosit! [L.], To your health! (A toast).

проспект [R.], avenue.

προσδεθητε [G.], fasten seatbelts.

προσεχετε! [G.], Caution!

προσοχη χρωμα [G.], Wet paint.

протест [R.], Protest.

Prudens futuri [L.], Thoughtful of the future.

πρωι-πρωι [G.], in the early morning.

Psyche [G.], A nymph, the personification of the soul; a beautiful maiden portrayed by Appuleins. She caused jelaousy of Venus because of Cupid.

pünctum [L.], point, dot; moment.

punctum salines [L.], a salient or prominent point.

Pythias [L.], One of the two Syracusans (the other was Damon), the symbols of friendship. They saved each other’s life.

qu’il soit comme il est desiré [F.], Let it be as desired.

qualis ab incepto [L.], the same as at the beginning.

quem di diligunt adolescens moritur [L.], he whom the gods love dies young.

qui facit per alium facit per se [L.], he who acts by another acts by himself.

qui m’aime, aime mon chien [F.], love me, love my dog.

qui non proficit, deficit [L.], he who does not advance goes backward.

qui transtulit sustinet [L.], he who transports, supports.

quid rides? [L.], why do you laugh?

quieta non movere [L.], not to disturb things at rest.

quis custodiet ipsos custodes [L.], who shall keep the keepers themselves?

raconteur [F.], a teller of stories.

raia [L.], a genus of marine fishes, including the skates or rays: Raya, from the class of Elasmobranchii, order of Batoidei.

railleur [F.], a jester; one addicted to raillery.

raison d’ étre [F.], the reason for a thing’s existence.

Raison d’état [F.], A reason of state.

rappel [F.], a recall.

Rathaus [N.], A townhall.

rationalis [L.], rational; syllogistic.

rationalitas [L.], rationality; reasonableness.

ratione soli [L.], as regards the soil.

рассказ [R.], story; account.

равенство [R.], equality.

раз [R.], time; one; occasion.

разыграть [R.], perform.

разрыть [R.], dig (up).

разрыв [R.], rupture; burst.

разворот [R.], U-turn; turn.

re infecta [L.], the business being unfinished.

re vera [L.], in truth; in actual fact.

Realschule [N.], A real school; a secondary German school giving an education more in modern subjects than in classics.

réchauffé [F.], warmed-up; a re-worked old text.

Recoje tu heno mientras que el sol luziere [S.], Make hay while the sun shines.

Reconnaissance [F.], Survey.

recte et suaviter [L.], justly and agreeably.

rectus in curia [L.], upright in court; with clean hands.

regent [E.], Australian bird belonging to the family of Meliphagidæ or honey eaters, Sericulus chrysocephalus. Discovered during the regency of George IV, hence the name.

relâche [F.], intermission.

relata refero [L.], I repeat the story as it was given to me.

religio loci [L.], the religious spirit of the place.

rem acu tetegisti [L.], you have hit the thing exactly.

remisso animo [L.], with mind remiss or listless.

ремонт [R.], repair(s); maintenance.

Remuda de pasturaje haze bizzeros gordos [S.], Change of pasture makes fat calves.

Renovato animos! [L.], Renew your courage!

renovato nomine [L.], by a revived name.

répertoire [F.], a list; a stock of songs, dramas, etc, already prepared.

requies [L.], rest, relaxation, repose.

res angusta domi [L.], narrow circumstances at home.

resonus [L.], echonig.

retoucher [F.], altered (in order to improve, or to produce a more desirable appearance).

ΡΕΥΜΑ [G.], Electricity.

rez-de-chaussée [F.], the ground floor.

Rhea (Cybele) [L.], The daughter of Uranus and Gaea; mother of the Gods (Zeus, Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon).

rhinoceros [L.], a rhinoceros; lit. nose-horned; a plant-eating mammal belonging to the family of Rhinocerotidæ.

Ride si sapis [L.], Laugh, if you are wise.

Rideau d’entr’acte [F.], The scene let down between the acts of play.

rigueur [F.], strictness; strict etiquette.

Risum teneatis, amici? [L.], Could you keep from laughing, friends?

ritus [L.], ritual, ceremony.

рок [R.], fate.

Rosa [L.], Rose, rose-bush.

rouge et noir [F.], red and black.

розга [R.], birch.

Ruse contre ruse [F.], Trick against trick; diamond cuts diamond.

Sa boule est demeuré [F.], He has failed in his object.

Salus populi suprema lex est [L.], The welfare of the people is the supreme law.

самовар [R.], samovar.

Samuel F. B. Morse [ ], The inventor of the telegraphic alphabet, or code.

sang-froid [F.], coolness; indifference.

sans cérémonie [F.], without ceremony or formality.

sans façon [F.], without ceremony.

Sans tache [F.], Stainless; without spot.

Satyagraha [Sutyagruha, Hind.], A grasping for truth. The political doctrine of Mohandas K. Gandhi, which favored passive resistance and non-co-operation in opposing British rule in India.

Saturnalis [L.], Of or belonging to Saturn; Saturnalia: the festival of Saturn, held in a mid-December, as a period of unrestrained merriment in celebration of the winter solstice.

satya [Sanskr.], truth.

Savoir faire [F.], Tact (the knowing how to act).

savoir vivre [F.], good-breeding; refined manners.

Sciurus Sciuridæ [L.], Squirrel (of the genus of Sciurus and family of Sciuridæ).

Se jeter dans l’eau de peur de la pluie [F.], To cast oneself into the water out of fear of rain.

semel pro semper [L.], once for all.

Septuagint [L. septuaginta, seventy], A Greek translation of the Old Testament: so called because it was said to be the work of seventy-two Palestinian Jews in the third century B.C., who completed the work in seventy days.

серьга [R.], earring.

серп [R.], sickle.

serpens [L.], the northern constellation of Draco (snake, serpent).

servare modum [L.], to keep within bounds.

сесть [R.], to sit down.

сетка [R.], net, netting.

сеть [R.], set, network.

Sesquipedalia verba [L.], Words a foot and a half long.

sextant [L.], 1. A sixth. 2. A sixth part of a circle. 3. An instrument capable of measuring angles of 120⁰ and more, emloyed chiefly by navigators .

sic [L.], used in a quotation, usually within brackets, in order to call attention to the fact that the quotation is literally given, though containing an error or misstatement.

Sic itur ad astra [L.], Such is the way to the stars, or to immortality.

sic volo sic jubeo; stat pro ratione voluntas [L.], thus I will, thus I command; let my will stand for a reason.

signum [L.], sign.

syllogismus [L.], Syllogism: to recon together, sum up. An argument of form of reasoning in which two statements or premises are made and a logical conclusion drawn from them.

simplex munditiis [L.], elegant in simplicity.

simulacrum [L.], likeness, image (portrait, statue, phantom, ghost, symbol, semblance, shadow).

sinecure [L.], an office which has revenue without employment; any office or post which gives remuneration without requiring much work, responsibility, etc.

sinister [L.], unfavourable.

Siste viator! [L.], Stop, traveler!

Siva [Hind.], The third God of the Hindu triad, representing the principle of destruction and reproduction; also Shiva.

скоро [R.], Soon; quickly.

скопом [R.], In a crowd, en masse.

скованост [R.], Constraint.

solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant [L.], they make a wilderness and call it peace.

solum [L.], ground, soil.

сон [R.], dream; sleep.

сонет [R.], sonnet.

Sottise! [F.], Absurdity; foolishness!

sotto voce [I.], in an undertone.

Soubrette [F.], A waiting-maid; an actress who plays the part of a waiting-maid, etc.

совок [R.], dust-pan; scoop; shovel.

совсем [R.], quite; entirely.

сознавать [R.], realizing; acknowledging.

Soyez ferme! [F.], Be firm (persevere)!

спазм [R.], spasm.

spes sibi quisque [L.], let every one hope in himself.

sphenoid [L.], the wedge-shaped compound bone at the base of the skull.

Sphinx [L.,G.], An Egyptian statue having, typically, the body of a lion and the head of a man, ram, or hawk.

Spolia optima [L.], The choicest of the spoils.

спонтанность [R.], Spontaneity.

срыв [R.], breakdown; ruining; disruption.

Spretæ injuria formæ [L.], The insult of despising her beauty.

Sta viator, heroem calcas [L.], Halt, traveler, thou standest on hero’s dust.

стакан [R.], glass.

Stamen [L.], A flower part situated within the petals and composed of the filament and the anther, filled with pollen; the microsporophyll of a seed plant.

старость [R.], Old age.

stat magni nominis umbra [L.], he stands in the shadow of a mighty name.

Stigma [L.], A mark, sign.

Στην υγεια σας! [G.], Cheers!

стоп [R.], stop.

stratum super stratum [L.], layer above layer.

стрекоза [R.], dragonfly.

строка [R.], line.

Strombus tricornis [L.], A spiral shell, a genus of marine gastropodous mollusks, having the external border or lip of the shell dilated into a wing.

Sturm und Drang [N.], Storm and stress.

Style [L.], A stalklike part of a pistil between the stigma and the ovary.

Stymphalus [G.], A valley, lake, river and town in Arcadia, Greece, infested by birds of prey, having wings, beaks, and claws of iron.

Suaviter in modo, fortier in re [L.], Gentle in manner, resolute in execution.

sub rosa [L.], under the rose; secretly.

suo Marte [L.], by his own provess.

superior/inferior maxillary [L.], upper/lower jaw.

Suppressio veri, suggestio falsi [L.], A suppression of the truth is the suggestion of a falsehood.

surgit amari aliquid [L.], something bitter arises.

Suum cuique [L.], To each his own.

сверх [R.], On top of, above, over; beyond.

Συνεχηε παρασταση [G.], continuous performance.

tabagie [F.], a smoking-room.

tabardus [L.], A short-sleeved cloak worn by knights over their armor, blazoned with their king’s or lord’s arms.

Talmud [L(Heb). Talmūdth, lit. instruction], The collection of writings constituting the Jewish civil and religious law: it consists of two parts, the Mishnah (text) and the Gemara (commentary).

Τα μεσανυχτα [G.], Midnight.

Τα θαλασσινα [G.], The shell fish (half shell, half fish).

τα Θεοφαυεια [G.], Epiphaneia (see under).

tam Marte quam Minerva [L.], as much by Mars as by Minerva; as much by courage as by skill.

tangram [L.], A Chinese puzzle made by cutting a square into five triangles, a square, and a rhomboid and using these pieces to form different figures and designs.

Tantæne animis cælestibus iræ? [L.], Can such anger dwell in heavenly minds?

tanto buon she val niente [L.], so good as to be good for nothing.

Tantum vidit Virgilium [L.], He merely saw Virgil; he only looked on the great man.

tarsus [L.], joint heel bone.

Tartarus [L.], Plouton (see under).

tel est notre plaisir [F.], such is our pleasure.

Telum imbelle, sine ictu [L.], A feeble weapon thrown without effect.

Tellus [L.], The Roman Goddess of the earth.

temporal [L.], in anatomy, either of a pair of compound bones forming the sides of the skull.

Tempus edax rerum [L.], Time, the devourer of all things.

teres atque rotundus [L.], smooth and round, polished and complete.

Terra cotta [I.], Baked earth; a hard, brown-red, usually unglazed earthenware used for pottery, statuettes, ornamental facing, etc.

tête de famille [F.], the head of the house; paterfamilias.

Thanatos Mors [G., L.], Death personified. (Thanatos [G.], Mors [L.] ).

thorax [L.], the chest/breastplate as the middle one of the three main segments of an insects body, as in Cicindella campestris.

Thwackum, Square [L.], The characters from Fielding’s Tom Jones.

tirailleur [F.], a sharpshooter; skirmisher.

το δοχειο [G.], pot (container).

Το ενθυμιο [G.], Souvenir.

το φιλμ [G.], film.

toga virilis [L.], the manly toga; the dress of manhood.

Το κλειδι [G.], Key; spanner.

το κνμα [G.], wave (sea).

Το καταγμα [G.], Fracture.

Tomava la por rosa mas devenia cardo [S.], I took her for a rose but she proved to be a thistle.

tombé des nues [F.], fallen from the clouds.

ton [F.], taste; fashion; high life.

тонна [R.], ton.

το πλευρο [G.], rib.

το ψαλιδι [G.], scissors.

το ψαρι [G.], fish.

τωρα[G.], now.

TORS [R.], torzo, trup. torso.

Tot homines, quot sententiæ [L.], So many men, so many opinions.

totis viribus [L.], with all his might.

Totus, teres, atque rotundus [L.], Complete, polished, and rounded.

toujours prêt [F.], always ready.

tout frais fait [F.], all expenses paid.

Tout le monde est sage aprés le coup [F.], Everybody is wise after the event.

το νημα [G.], thread.

Trahit sua quemque voluptas [L.], Every one is attracted by his own liking.

Travaux forcés [F.], Hard labor.

треск [R.], Crackle; crack.

тревога [R.], Anxiety.

tria juncta in uno [L.], three joined in one.

Trimurti [Sanskr.], The Hindu trinity of Gods: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.

triptychos [G.], Threefold. A set of three panels with pictures, designs, or carvings.

Trisagion [G.], An ancient hymn in whose beginning the word holy is repeated three times.

Tristesse [F.], Depression of spirits.

Triton [G.], A son of Poseidon and Amptirite who lived in a golden palace on the bottom of the sea.

uberrima fides [L.], superabounding faith.

ubique patriam reminisci [L.], to remember our country everywhere.

Übung macht den Meister [N.], Practice makes the master.

Ulmus [L.], An elm.

Ultra licitum [L.], Beyond what is allowable.

ultra vires [L.], transcending authority.

Un bien fait n’est jamais perdu [F.], An act of kindness is never lost.

un fait accompli [F.], an accomplished fact.

Un je servirai [F.], One I will serve.

Una volta furfante e sempre furfante [I.], Once a knave, always a knave.

Un cabello hace sombra [S.], A single hair makes a shadow.

Un sot trouve toujours un plus sot qui l’admire [F.], A fool always finds a greater fool to admire him.

und so weiter [N.], and so forth.

unter vier Augen [N.], under four eyes.

Ursa Major [L.], The Great Bear constellation in the northern sky.

Ursus Ornatus [L.], Spectacled bear, so called because of a peculiar marking about the eye suggesting spectacles.

usque ad aras [L.], to the last extremity; to the very altars.

Usque ad nauseam [L.], So as to induce disgust.

Ut infra [L.], As below.

ut pignus amicitæ [L.], as a pledge of friendship.

Ut supra [L.], As above stated.

utcunque placuerit Deo [L.], as it shall please God.

valet de place [F.], a guide for visitors to a place.

Valete et plaudite [L.], Good-by and applaud us; said by Roman actors at the end of a piece.

Varium et mutabile semper femina [L.], Woman is ever a changeful and capricious thing.

vastitas [L.], desolation, desert; devastation, destruction.

vastus [L.], uncultivated, ravaged.

vaudeville [F.], a ballad; a comic opera.

Vedi Napoli e poi muori [I.], See Naples and then die.

vehimur in altum [L.], we are carried out into the deep.

velis et remis [L.], with sails and oars; by every possible means.

veluti in speculum [L.], even as in a mirror.

Venalis populus, venalis curia patrum [L.], The people are venal, and the senate is equally venal.

Venenum in auro bibitur [L.], Poison is drunk from golden vessels.

venia necessitati datur [L.], necessity has no law; indulgence is granted for necessity.

ventre à terre [F.], at full speed. (lit. with belly to the ground).

vera pro gratiis [L.], truth before favor.

Vera prosperità è non necessità [I.], It is true prosperity to have no want.

верх [R.], summit; height.

vérité sans peur [F.], truth without fear.

vernacularism [L. vernaculus, - ismus, F. Verna; native], a vernacular word or idiom. vernacular adj: 1. Using a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language; of, relating to, or being a nonstandard or substandard language or dialect of a place, region, or country; of, relating to, or being the normal spoken form of a language. 2. Applied to a plant or animal in the common native speech as distinguished from the Latin nomenclature of scientific classification. 3. Of, relating to, or characteristic of a period, place, or group. vernacular n: 1. A vernacular language, expression, or mode of expression. 2. The mode of expression of a group or class. 3. A vernacular name of a plant or animal.

Veronica chamaedrys [L.], A plant congeneric with the speedwell, with small bluish, white and red flowers. Used for tea.

vertebra [L.], a joint bone in spinal column.

vertigo [L.], dizziness; turning round.

верность [R.], faithfulness, loyalty.

ветерок [R.], breeze.

victrix Victoriola [L.], victorious, little statue of Victory.

videtur [L.], it appears.

Vincit qui patitur [L.], He who endures conquers.

Vincit qui se vincit [L.], He conquers who conquers himself.

vino dentro, senno fuori [I.], when the wine is in, the wit is out.

vir sapit qui pauca loquitor [L.], he is a wise man who says but little.

Virtus in actione consistit [L.], Virtue consists in action.

Virtus sola nobilitat [L.], Virtue alone ennobles.

virtute officii [L.], by virtue of office.

Virtutis amore [L.], From love of virtue.

vis inertiæ [L.], the power of inertia.

Vis vitæ [L.], The vigor of life.

Vive la bagatelle! [F.], Long live folly!

Vive ut vivas [L.], Live that you may live.

Vivere est cogitare [L.], To live is to think.

вывеска [R.], Sign; pretext.

vivida vis animi [L.], the living force of the mind.

Vivit post funera virtus [L.], Virtue survives the grave.

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona [L.], Brave men lived before Agamemnon (great men lived in previous ages).

VLSI [ ],Very Large Scale Integration: The process of integrating with a very high density on a single chip the high-complexity electronic circuits.

вмазывать [R.], cement.

voir le dessous des cartes [F.], to see under side of the cards.

Volo, non valeo [L.], I am willing, but unable.

volventibus annis [L.], as the years roll by.

воск [R.], wax, beeswax.

восторг [R.], rapture, delight.

vox et præterea nihil [L.], a voice and nothing more; sound but no sense.

Vox Dei, vox populi [L.], The voice of God is the voice of the people.

Vox populi, vox Dei [L.], The voice of the people is the voice of God.

vraisemblance [F.], probability; apparent truth.

вскоре [R.], soon, shortly after.

встать! [R.], get up; stand up!

ντοπιοςαο [G.], local.

ντυνομαι [G.], I dress.

Vulgate [L.], A Latin version of the Bible prepared by St. Jerome in the fourth century, serving as the authorized version of the Roman Catholic Church.

Vulgo [L.], Commonly.

vultur [L.], Any of a number of large birds of prey related to the eagles and hawks.

vultus vulticulus [L.], appearance of a mere look.

νυσταζω [G.], I’m sleepy.

νωρις [G.], early.

Wahrheit gegen Freund und Feind [N.], Truth in spite of friend and foe.

Xe [E.], Xenon, chemical element.

xenium [L.], present.

Yama [Sanskr.], A Hindu God, king of the underworld and the appointed judge and punisher of the dead. He is generally represented as crowned and seated on a buffalo, which he guides by the horns. He is four-armed and holds a mace in one hand, and in another a noose which is used to draw out of the bodies of men the souls which are doomed to appear before his judgment seat. His garments are red, his skin is bluish-green.

загар [R.], Sunburn, tan.

замок [R.], Castle.

запас [R.], Hem.

запросто [R.], Without ceremony.

завеса [R.], veil, screen.

завет [R.], testament; behest.

завоз [R.], carriage; delivery.

знать [R.], To know.

зона [R.], zone, region.

zum Beispiel [N.], for example.

NOTEBOOK I >>

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