cartesian rebirth (aragon)

I realized that man is sopping with gods like a sponge immersed in heaven. These gods live, they reach their prime, then die, bequeathing their perfumed altars to other gods. They are the very law behind the total transformation of everything in this world. They are the necessity of movement. So, I ecstatically strolled among a thousand divine concretions. I began to formulate a walking mythology or, more accurately, a modern mythology, which is the name under which I conceived it.

- 95, "Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

crunchtime (aragon)

Sick with logic, like all mankind, I mistrusted sanctified hallucinations.

- 93, "Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on the beauty of public baths and the draw of mystery and transgression (aragon)

BATHS is all it says on the façade, and that word covers a multitude of veracious signs, the thousand pleasures and maledictions to which our bodies are heir. But who knows? Perhaps one will find, beneath its roof, the promised water, limpid and singing. The unknown is a powerful temptation, and danger even more so. Modern society scarcely takes into account these instincts of the individual; it believes it has suppressed both temptations. And perhaps, in our latitudes, only the heart readily intoxicated may be susceptible to the unknown. As for danger, you can see with your own eyes how things grow increasingly tame from day to day. In love, however, whether it declare itself as this physical fury, or this specter, or this spirit of diamond whispering in my ear a name which sounds like freshness, there is a principle outside the law, an irrepressible urge to violate, a scorn of prohibitions, and a liking for rapine. You can always try confining this hydra-headed passion to your own house or even giving it the run of palaces: it will still crave its freedom, always bursting forth wherever it wasn’t asked to cool its heels, wherever it can unleash its unruly splendor. Let it grow where it was not planted: how vulgarity makes it convulse!

- 40, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on crazy weekends, crazy lives (aragon)

At last the senses have established their hegemonies over the earth. In the future what conceivable purpose can reason serve? Oh, reason, reason, yesterday’s flimsy ghost! – I had already expelled you from my dreams, here I am on the verge of seeing them couple with apparent realities: this place is filled with my self. Reason vainly strives to have me denounce the dictatorship of sensuality. It vainly cautions me against error, queen of this realm. Enter, Madame, my body is your crown and scepter. I stroke my delirium like a pretty horse.

- 3, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on people-watching and stillness (aragon)

For years on end, this couple has sat within its molehill watching skirt hems and trouser legs shinning up the ladder of assignations. For years they have sat bound in the straitjacket of this absurd place on the edge of the arcades, two elderly souls who can be seen frittering away their lives, he smoking and she sewing, sewing, indefatigably sewing as if the fate of the universe hung from her fabric. God knows with what strange blooms their paired skulls are decorated, for in the lingering hours and in the darkness, the darkness which saves them the exorbitant cost of an electric lamp, lovely natural growths must, at their unrestricted leisure, pile up behind this united front of foreheads. So accustomed to one another that their daily chatter has at last thinned into silence, the two must now accompany the mechanical gesture of the pipe and the needle with such magnificent arabesques of the imagination as are generally expected only from poets. Seeing the footsteps of mystery and harlotry criss-cross outside their windowpane, what thoughts do they exhume from the bottom of their minds, these sitters bitten by advancing age and idleness of heart?

- 14, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

love, and agreed misunderstanding/imaginings (aragon)

A fiction like this, for people who fail to see in it the reverse side of our several existences, will seem infantile. Make no mistake: the imagination never goes unrequited; this is the first giant step toward an achievement, and the myth would lead those few people who had presided over its birth a long way indeed.

- 111, "The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on you are the new day (aragon)

Each day alters the modern feelings of existence. A mythology takes shape and comes undone. It is a scene of life belonging only to the innocent, a living science which engenders and kills itself.

- 5, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

cheap thrills and dead divine (aragon)

The world evinces so little faith in human aspirations, as is so knowing about the extent of each depravity, the universal fear of compromising oneself, the mechanical resignation to happiness, habit (the only woman who wears a corset nowadays), that—to my great consternation I admit—I wonder if skipping town for some other region better adapted to the mobility of my nature would not be well advised; that I dream of a sweet, cruel people; a feline people infatuated with its claws and perpetually ready to tear out its eyes and scruples. I dream of a people various like moire and sporting the bruises of love, that no one any longer cares to provide our avid sloth with the diversions to which it dares not lay claim. (42, The Passage de L'Opera)

But midnight is not enough for your adorable ghosts: the entire day and sleep scarcely suffice, in your walls the perpetual noise of a trailing gown disturbs you in some marvelous way, and you love it, that noise. (145, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

Among natural forces one power, acknowledged from time immemorial, remains as mysterious to man as ever, and an integral part of his existence: night. This great black illusion conforms to fashion and to the slightest variations of its slaves. The night of our cities bears no resemblance to that howling of dogs in the Roman shadows, nor to the bat of the Middle Ages, nor yet to that image of sorrows which is the Renaissance night. She is a gigantic monster of sheetmetal perforated with knife holes. The blood of modern night is a singing light. On her breast she wears shifting tattoos. Her hair is curled around sparklers, and where the plumes of smoke finally evaporate, some men have climbed aboard shooting stars. Night has whistles and lakes of incandescence. She hangs like a fruit from the earth’s littoral, like a side of beef from the cities’ golden fist. This palpitating corpse has let her tresses fall loose over the world, and in this nest the last, uncertain ghost of liberties takes refuge, slaking just a few steps from streets brightly lit by the civil sense, its all-consuming thirst for open air and danger. Thus, in public gardens, the densest region of shade merges its identity into a desperate kiss of love and revolt. (115, The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont)

- Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

cheap thrills (aragon)

Everything base contains a touch of the marvelous, which arouses me. A scent of danger always surrounds these ladies: eyes whose circles have been permanently etched and whose weariness is deified by makeup, hands whose devilish expertise their every movement demonstrates, an intoxicating air of facility, their agonizing persiflage, lewd voices, specific trivia which narrate the hazards of a lifetime, signs betraying its suspected calamities; everything about them counsels fear of love’s ignominious perils; yet, with equal persuasion, everything about them shows me the abyss and makes me dizzy. I am bound, presently, to forgive them for consuming me. I am like the cloth merchant in The Thousand and One Nights who married a palace beauty; she thrashed him with a rod because he neglected to wash his hands before caressing her, and then she severed his thumbs with a razor; but he couldn’t fault her on such slight grounds and swore to wash his hands thereafter six-score times with alkali, saltwort ashes, and soap; then he bought a house and lived there for a year with his bride.

- 29, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

passages from "Imagination's Speech" (aragon)

As I said to the students of Germany in 1819, one can anticipate everything from the power of mind. Already its pure, fantastic inventions have, to giddy effect, given you mastery over yourselves; I have invented memory, writing, infinitesimal calculus.
…
Everything stems from the imagination, and all that is imaginary sheds light. The telephone is purportedly useful: don’t believe a word of it; just observe man convulsing over the receiver as he shouts ”Hello?” What is he if not an addict of sound, dead drunk on conquered space and the transmitted voice? My poisons are yours: here is love, strength, speed. Do you want pains, death or songs? (51)

Go right ahead, buy your damnation; at last you’re about to lose yourself—here’s a machine to upend your soul. I bring tidings of supreme importance: a new vice has just been born, one more source of vertigo has been given to man, surrealism, son of frenzy and darkness. Enter, enter, here begin the realms of the instantaneous. (52)

Soon, tomorrow, the obscure desire for security which unites mankind will dictate primitive taboos. (53)

Some words are mirrors, optical lakes toward which hands stretch in vain. (73)

- Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on systems unthinkable (aragon)

There exists in the world an unthinkable disorder, and the extraordinary thing is that, as a rule, men have sought a mysterious order beneath the appearance of disorder, an order entirely natural to them which merely expresses an innate desire of theirs and which, once they have introduced it into things, they behold with wonder, ascribing it to an idea, explaining it in light of that idea. So it comes about that for them everything is providential, and they account for a phenomenon which merely bears witness to their reality, which is the relationship they establish between themselves and, say, the germination of a poplar, by an hypothesis which sets their minds at rest; then they wonder at a divine principle which gave the lightness of a cotton to a seed requiring air enough to ride in its countless appointed rounds of self-propagation.

Man’s mind cannot tolerate disorder because it cannot think it; I mean that it cannot think it first, in isolation. That every idea arises hand in hand with its opposite is a truth suffering from the lack of examination. Disorder is conceived only in relation to order, and, subsequently, order only in relation to disorder. But only subsequently. The form of the word itself determines that. Your intention, in giving a divine character to disorder, is to make it impossible for disorder to evolve from an abstract conception into a concrete value. The concept of order is scarcely counterbalanced by the ineradicable concept of disorder. Whence the divine explanation.

- 154, "The Feeling of Nature in Buttes-Chaumont," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

deceitful letters (aragon)

I wanted to know if there still existed somewhere in his domain a bizarre institution which Paul Valery had once described to me: an agency where one could arrange to have letters mailed from any point of the globe to any given address, thus making it possible to fake a voyage to the Far East without straying even one inch from the Far West of some lawless escapade. I couldn’t uncover a clue: the concierge had never heard of any such place…. After all, what does a concierge know? And perhaps it’s been more than twenty years since Paul Valery has had occasion to use such deceit.

15, "The Passage de L’Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on tricky creations (aragon)

It would appear that to God, the world is merely a vehicle for several essays at still-life painting. He has a handful of gimmicks to which he invariably resorts: the absurd, the bizarre, the banal… there is no way to getting him to enlarge his scope.

- 37, The Passage de L'Opera, Le Paysan de Paris, Lois Aragon

on love and fullness (aragon)

There are moments when everybody is unequal to his love, moments which resemble an overripe berry, moments gorged with themselves. By collateral paths desire and rapture have increased, and when they touch, when they merge, in a leap, a reeling of vision, I attain myself beyond my own means, beyond circumstances, which are no longer the several glimmering aspects of things, but my life, life itself, the instinct of survival, the thought that I am a continuous being transcending all my endeavors, transcending memory; I attain myself, I attain the concrete feeling of existence which is cloaked in death.

- 116, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on chance and delight (aragon)

I am the receptacle of my sense and of chance. I am like a gambler engaged in roulette who would laugh in your face if you came round urging him to invest in petroleum stock. I am playing the wheel of my body and betting on red.

- 2, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on belief and love (aragon)

They told me that love is laughable, they told me that it’s simple, and explained how my heart works. So it seems. They told me not to believe in miracles, that if the table turns, somebody is nudging it with his foot. Finally, they showed me a man who falls in love on command, really in love, in love! can you beat that? in love; it’s the oldest story around.

But you don’t realize just how gullible I am, how ready at this point to believe anything: flowers could sprout up in her footsteps; she could turn night into broad daylight, and all the fantasies of the drunk or imagining mind, and it wouldn’t seem extraordinary. If they do not love, they are blind. I have seen the big white ghost with a broken chain emerge from the crypt; they, on the contrary, have not sensed the divinity of this woman. It strikes them as natural that she should be there, coming and going: their knowledge of her is abstract, it is formulated at one remove. The inexplicable does not strike them as obvious, does it?

- 145, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont, Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

aragon on wonder and love

Good people, my information comes from heaven. The secrets of every soul, like the secrets of language and of love, are revealed to me nightly, and there are nights in broad daylight. When you pass near me your clothing flies off; you account books flip open to the page dissimulations and frauds; your alcove is unveiled, and your heart as well! Your heart like a butterfly-sphinx in the sun, your heart like a ship foundering on a reef, your heart like a compass crazed by a little piece of lead, like laundry drying in the wind, like the whinnying of horses, like millet thrown to birds, like a discarded evening paper. Your heart is a charade known to everyone. (69, Imagination's Speech)

Charming substitute, you are the synopsis of a world of wonders, of the natural world, and it is you who are reborn when I close my eyes. You are the wall and its breach. You are the horizon and the immediate presence. The ladder and the iron rungs. Total eclipse. Light. Miracle. And can anyone think of what isn’t miracle when miracle stands there in her nightdress?” Thus the universe gradually effaces itself for me; it melts away while from its depths the outline of an adorable ghost emerges, an immense female, pressing against me on all sides, in the stablest aspect of a waning world. O desire, twilight of forms, in the rays of this decline of life I seize myself like a prisoner at the bars of liberty, me the inmate of love, convict number…, and there follows a number too long for my mouth to memorize. (138, The Feeling of Nature in the Buttes-Chaumont)
- Le Paysan de Paris

on being - everything and liminality (aragon)

Caught in the maze, the mind is dragged toward the denouement of its destiny, the labyrinth without a Minotaur where, transfigured like the Virgin, radium-fingered Error reappears, my singing mistress, my pathetic shadow.
...

The modern world is the only one which answers my mode of being. A great crisis is newly born, an immense disturbance coming into clear focus. The beautiful, the good, the just, the true, the real,…and a horde of other abstract words are, this very instant, losing credit. Their opposites, once preferred, will soon become synonyms. After the universal crucible has reduced everything to uniform mental matter, only ideal facts will survive. I am a lightning bolt passing through myself, and fleeing. I shall be able to overlook nothing, for I am the passage from darkness to light, I am simultaneously the West and the dawn. I am a limit, a line. Let everything mingle in the wind; all words cohabit in my mouth. And surrounding me is a wrinkle, a visible shiver curling upward like a wave.

- page 89, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

on growing up and growing stale (aragon)

Everything is fine until the age of twenty. After that, it’s finished: curiosity, mystery, temptation, rapture, adventure are done for, done for. They do exercises to stay slim, but would they exert themselves to keep the color fast in their lives and the itch in their days? None of that; after twenty they give no more thought to the gymnastics of love. They’ve learned their little parts. They’ve got a technique down pat and won’t let go of it: you clasp the woman in your arms and say to her… whereupon she falls on the sofa exclaiming, “Oh, Charles!” You have only to see what happens in the slick films. Do they ever by any chance show a woman, who, upon noticing some guy, walks straight up to him, without words but with flashing eyes, and suddenly places her hand on his crotch? A film like that would never succeed; it wouldn’t seem realistic enough, and what the public clamors for is realities, RE-AL-I-TIES:

REALITIES

A FABLE

Once upon a time

There was a reality

With its sheep of real wool

The king’s son happened by

The sheep bleat How pretty

Is re re reality

Once upon a time

It came to pass at night

A reality could not fall asleep

Its fairy godmother

Really took it by the hand

Re re reality

Once upon a time

An aged king was bored

His mantle slipped off

In the evening

So he was given a queen named

Re re reality

CODA: Ity, ity rea

ity ity reality

Rea rea

ty ty rea

ty ty rea

li

ty reality

Once upon a time there was REALITY

- page 43, "The Passage de L'Opera," Le Paysan de Paris, Louis Aragon

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