4:00 a.m. – Lie completely still and compose six hauntingly perfect quatrains in your mind. Refuse to scribble them down. Let them ferment in the silence like forbidden knowledge.6:47 a.m. – Brew tea. Steep it precisely thirty-two seconds while murmuring a sonnet to the leaves. The tea listens. The tea understands.8:00 a.m. – Receive a letter from Death. Decline his invitation; you cannot stop for him. Reseal the letter with wax and hide it under your pillow.
An architect draws a watercolordepicting two people about toenter a meeting room, whilesomeoneon the stairway gazes through windowsat a park, river, skyscrapersbeyond; he does not want to belockedlike a carbon atom in a benzenering but needs to rotate, lift off,veer along wharves andshoreline. In the acoustics ofthis space,he catches a needle bounceoff a black granite floor, wandersfrom a main walkway, encountersprickly pear burned purple in wind.In the ocean gusts before dawn,he yearns for a Mediterranean spraywhere sunlight tingles eyelashes,where sand releases heatunder the stars. In the atrium,two violinists launch fireworksof sound that arc, explode, dissolveinto threads of melodic charm.Here slate near a pool of waterabsorbs sunlight, releases ripplesinto the evening; and in this space,each minute is encounter:he steps out and makesfootprints on a sidewalk dusted with snow.
Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.
“Many years before, it is true, on a visit to the poet laureate, Alfred Austin, as they sat with others on the lawn in the afternoon, it was suggested that each person should tell his idea of heaven: ‘Austin’s idea was to sit … in a garden, and while he sat to receive constant telegrams announcing alternately a British victory by sea and a British victory by land’; ‘mine’, said Blunt, ‘was to be laid out to sleep in a garden, with running water near, and so to sleep for a hundred thousand years, then to be woke by a bird singing, and to call out to the person one loved best, “Are you there?” and for her to answer, “Yes, are you?” and so turn round and go to sleep again for another hundred thousand years’.” — Edith Finch, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 1938
Via Futility Closet
