LOUIS ARAGON – LE PAYSAN DE PARIS: The Passage de L’Opera: Itty Bitties

I am putting aside my microscope for a while. Needless to say, writing with one eye screwed to a lens, even in this white room, decidedly impairs one’s vision. My eyes, assigned to cross purposes, reel before finally teaming up again. The thread of a screw behind my forehead unwinds in slow spirals trying to retrace its point: the most inconsequential objects loom gigantically large’ a pitcher and an inkwell bring to mind Notre Dame and the Morgue. My writing hand seems too close; my pen is a skewer of fog. As objects resume proportion, the microcosm which I once irradiated with my mirrors and filtered through the tiny diaphragm of attention recedes like a dream erased in the morning. Following the natural bents of our heart, drifting after its delirious interpretations, only then are we able to credit you, glorious bacterial dramas, with the passionate motives designed in the likeness of our own real sorrows. Love is the one feelings whose stature is so great that it can be ascribed to the infinitely small. But, for once, let’s formulate your power struggles, microbes; let’s think about your domestic squalls. What mistakes in reckoning the budget, what fraud in the account books, what municipal concussions preside—alongside the physical phenomenon—over observable phagocytoses? Move, move as if your life depended on it, tragic bacilli dragooned into a complicated adventure where the observer can perceive only the satisfying, rational games of biology’s fixed laws! Neon signs of distress, itty-bitties raising a whirlwind of enigmas in my field of vision, what are you inscribing there? What’s the meaning of this film depicting your migrations, like the dance of colloids. I am trying to decipher this speedwriting: the only legible word in the constantly shifting swarm of cuneiform letters is not Justice, but Death. On, death, charming, dusty child, here is a small palace for your flirtations! Come closer to me on your shapely heels, smooth out your taffeta dress, and dance. All the subterfuges of the world, all the artifices extending the power of my sense, astronomic lenses and eyepieces of every description, narcotics like fresh wild flowers, alcohols and the pneumatic drills, surrealisms, they divulge your presence everywhere. Death, round like my eye, I was forgetting you, I was ambling along oblivious of having to come home, my good housekeeper, home where the soup is already turning cold in the bowls, where you nonchalantly munch on radishes and twist the hem of the tablecloth with your bony digits, waiting for me. Goodness, don’t fret, I’m still feeding you peanuts, a whole rasher of boulevards on which to sharpen your darling teeth. Don’t taunt me; I’ll return. (25-26)