blonde fixation (aragon)

Serpents, serpents, you are endlessly fascinating to me. One day in the Passage de l’Opera I was watching the slow, pure coils of a python of blondness, and suddenly, for the first time, it struck me that men have found but one simile for blond, blond like wheat, satisfied that they have thus put it in a nutshell. Wheat, wretches, but have you never looked at ferns? For a whole year I bit fern hair. I have known resin hair, topaz hair, hysteria hair. Blond like hysteria, blond like the sky, blond like fatigue, blond like a kiss. On the palette of blondnesses, I shall include the elegance of automobiles, the odor of sainfoin, the silence of mornings, the complexities of waiting, the ravages of another body grazing mine. How blond the noise of rain, how blond the song of mirrors! From the perfume of gloves to the screech of the barn-owl, from the beatings of the assassin’s heart to the flame-flower of laburnum, from the bite to the song, how many blondnesses, how many lids: the blondness of roofs, of wings, of tables, of palms, there are entire days of blondness, department stores of blond, arcades for desire, arsenals of orangeade powder. Blond as far as the eye can reach: I capitulate to this pitchpine of the senses, to this concept of blondness which is not the color itself but (as it were), a spirit of color inexplicably wed to the style of love. From white to red by the way of yellow, blond does not relinquish its mystery. Blond resembles the tongue-ties of excitement, the piracies of lips, the shivering of limpid waters. Blond escapes what defines it by following a meandering path on which I discover wildflowers and seashells. It is a kind of reflection of woman on stones, a paradoxical shadow of caresses in the air, a breath of reason’s collapse. Blond like the reign of hugs, the hair in this boutique on the passage dissolved while I let myself die for fifteen minutes and more. I felt that I could have spent my life near this swarm of wasps, the river of gleams. In this subaqueous realm, how can one not be reminded of cinema heroines who, searching for some lost ring, bundle the New World of their bodies into a diving suit? This uncoiled head of hair had the electric pallor of storms, the dew of breath condense on metal. A kind of lazy beast dozing in a car. Amazing that it made no more noise than bare feet on a rug. What is blonder than moss? I have often imagined seeing champagne on forest floors. And skirrets! Orange milk agaric! Scampering hares! The moon—sliver of cuticles! The heart of woods! Pink! The blood of plants! Doe eyes! Memory—memory is really blond. At its far reaches, where fact weds fancy, what pretty clusters of light!

- pages 30 - 31, "The Passage de L’Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon