Our Lady of Silence

Sometimes, when I feel discouraged and depressed, even my ability to dream loses its leaves and shrivels, and the only kind of dreaming I can have is to muse on my dreams, and so I leaf through them, like a book one leafs through over and over, finding nothing but inevitable words. And then I ask myself who you are, you this figure who traverses all my languid visions of unknown landscapes and ancient interiors and splendid pageants of silence. In all of my dreams you appear, in dream form, or you accompany me as a false reality. With you I visit regions that are perhaps dreams of yours, lands that are perhaps your bodies of absence and inhumanity, your essential body dissolved into the shape of a tranquil plain and a stark hill on the grounds of some secret place. Perhaps I have no dream but you. Perhaps it is in your eyes, when my face leans into yours, that I read these impossible landscapes, these unreal tediums, these feelings that inhabit the shadows of my weariness and the caves of my disquiet. Perhaps the landscapes of my dreams are my way of not dreaming about you. I don’t know who you are, but do I know for certain who I am? Do I really know what it means to dream, such that I can know what it means to call you my dream? How do I know that you’re not a part of me, perhaps the real and essential part? And how do I know it’s not I who am the dream and you the reality, I who am your dream instead of you being mine?

What sort of life do you have? By what manner of seeing do I see you? Your profile? It’s never the same, yet it never changes. And I say this because I know it, without knowing that I know it. Your body? It’s the same whether naked or dressed, and in the same position whether seated or standing or lying down. What is the meaning of this that means nothing?

♦ My life is so sad, and I don’t even think of weeping over it; my days are so false, and I don’t even dream of trying to change them.

How can I possibly not dream of you? Lady of the Passing Hours, Madonna of stagnant waters and rotting seaweed, Tutelary Goddess of the sprawling deserts and the black landscapes of barren cliffs – deliver me from my youth.

Consoler of the disconsolate, Tears of those who never weep, Hour that never strikes – deliver me from joy and happiness.

Opium of all silences, unplucked Lyre, Stained-Glass Window of distance and exile – make me hated by men and scorned by women. Cymbal of Extreme Unction, Caress that doesn’t touch, Dove lying dead in the shade, Oil of hours spent dreaming – deliver me from religion, for it is sweet, and from unbelief, for it is strong.

Lily drooping in the afternoon, Keepsake Box of wilted roses. Silence between prayers – fill me with loathing for being alive, with resentment for being healthy, and with contempt for my youth.

Make me useless and sterile, O Shelter of all hazy dreams; make me pure for no reason, and indifferently false, O Running Water of Sad Experience; let my mouth be a frozen landscape, my eyes two dead ponds, and my gestures the slow withering of decrepit trees, O Litany of Disquiet, O Royal Mass of Weariness, O Corolla, O Holy Fluid, O Ascension!

What a pity I must pray to you as to a woman and cannot love you

..... as one loves a man, nor feast my dream’s eyes on you as the Dawn-in-Reverse of the unreal sex of those angels who never entered heaven!

♦ In my prayer to you I offer my love, because my love is itself a prayer, but I don’t think of you as my beloved nor hold you up before me as a saint.

May your acts be the statue of renunciation, your gestures the pedestal of indifference, and your words the stained-glass windows of denial. ♦ Splendour of nothing, name from the abyss, peace from the Beyond…

Eternal virgin, who existed before the gods, before the gods’ fathers, and before the fathers of the gods’ fathers, barren Virgin of all the worlds, sterile Virgin of all souls…

To you we lift up all days and all beings; the stars are votive offerings in your temple; and the weariness of the gods returns to your breast like the bird to the nest it built without knowing how.

From the height of anguish may we see the day come into view! And if we see no day come, then let that be the day that comes into view!

Shine, absence of sun! Glow, fading moon!…

Only you, unshining sun, light up the caves, for the caves are your daughters. Only you, unreal moon, give ..... to the caverns, for the caverns.....

♦ Your sex is that of dreamed forms, the sterile sex of ..... figures. Now a vague profile, now a mere stance, and sometimes just a languid gesture – you are moments and stances which, spiritualized, become mine. My dreaming of you implies no fascination with your sex, with what lies beneath your ethereal robe, O Madonna of inner silences. Your breasts are not the kind one would imagine kissing. Your body is all soulish flesh, and yet it is body, not soul. The substance of your flesh isn’t spiritual, it’s spirituality. You are the woman before the Fall, still a sculpture made from that clay that ..... paradise.

My horror of real women endowed with sex is the road that brought me to you. How can one love the women of earth, who must endure the shifting weight of a man to be ? How can one’s ..... love not wither in the foreglimpse of the pleasure that serves […] sex? Who can honour the Wife without being assaulted by the thought that she’s a woman who copulates? Who can help but despise having a mother by whom he was so vulvally, loathsomely born?* How can we not despise ourselves when we think of the carnal origin of our soul, of that restless, bodily ..... that brings our flesh into the world? And however lovely that flesh may be, it’s ugly by virtue of its origin, loathsome because it was born.

False, real-life idealists dedicate poems to the Wife and kneel to the idea of the Mother… Their idealism is a cloak that disguises, not a dream that creates.

You alone are pure, Lady of Dreams, whom I can conceive as a lover without conceiving any stain, for you are unreal. I can conceive of you as a mother and adore you, for you were never defiled by the horror of being fertilized or the horror of giving birth. How not adore you when you alone are adorable? How not love you when you alone are worthy of love?

Perhaps by dreaming you I create you, real in some other reality; perhaps it is there that you are mine, in a different, pure world where we love each other without tangible bodies, with another kind of embrace and other, ideal forms of possessing. Perhaps I didn’t create you; perhaps you already existed and I merely saw you with a different kind of vision – pure and inner – in another, perfect world. Perhaps my dreaming of you was simply my finding you, and my loving you merely my thinking of you. Perhaps my contempt for the flesh and my loathing of love were the obscure desire with which, unaware of your existence, I waited for you; perhaps they were my uncertain hope by which, without knowing you, I already loved you.

It could even be that I already loved you in some vague wherever, and that my nostalgia for that love makes everything in my present life a tedium. Perhaps you are just my nostalgia for something, an embodiment of some absence, the presence of some Distance, female for reasons that don’t have to do with being a female.

I can think of you as both a virgin and a mother, for you are not of this world. The child you hold in your arms was never any younger that you could have defiled him by carrying him in your womb. You were never other than who you are, so how could you not be a virgin? I can both love and adore you, for my love doesn’t possess you and my adoration doesn’t put you at a distance. Be the Eternal Day and let my sunsets be made of your sun’s rays, inseparable from you.

Be the Invisible Twilight, with my disquiet and my yearnings as the shades of your indecision, the colours of your uncertainty.

Be the Absolute Night, the Sole Night, in which I totally lose and forget myself, with my dreams glowing as stars on your body of distance and negation…

Let me be the folds of your robe, the jewels of your tiara, and the strange gold in the rings on your fingers.

Let me be ashes from your fireplace, because so what if I’m dust? Or a window in your room, because so what if I’m mere space? Or an ..... hour in your clepsydra, because so what if I pass on but remain yours, if I die but live on as yours, if I lose you but by losing you find you?

Mistress of absurdities, Votary of nonsense phrases,* may your silence cradle me and your ..... lull me. May your pure being caress and soothe and comfort me, O heraldic Lady from the Beyond, O Empress of Absence, Virgin Mother of all silences, Hearthstone of cold souls, Guardian Angel of the forlorn, O unreal and human Landscape of sad, eternal Perfection.

♦ You aren’t a woman. Not even within me do you evoke anything that feels feminine to me. It’s only when I speak of you that the words call you female and the phrases outline a woman’s profile. For I can’t help but speak of you with tenderness and dreamy affection, and words find a voice for this only by addressing you as a woman.

But you, in your vague substance, are nothing. You have no reality, not even a reality that belongs only to you. Strictly speaking, I don’t see you or even feel you. You’re like a feeling whose object is its own self, contained entirely in the heart of its being. You’re always the landscape that I was just about to lay eyes on, the hem of the robe that I just missed seeing, lost in an eternal Now beyond the bend in the road. Your profile is your nothingness, and the contour of your unreal body tears apart, into separate pearls, the necklace of the very idea of contour. You’ve already passed, you’ve already gone, and I’ve already loved you – this is what I feel when I feel your presence.

You occupy the blanks in my thoughts and the gaps in my sensations, which is why I neither think of you nor feel you. But my thoughts are vaulted with the feeling of you, and my feelings are gothic with your lofty evocation.

Moon of lost memories over the black, vividly empty landscape of my imperfection’s self-awareness. My being feels you vaguely, as if it were one of your belts that feels you. I lean over your white face that flutters in the nocturnal waters of my disquiet, knowing that you are the moon in my sky that causes it, or a strange underwater moon that somehow feigns it. If only someone could create New Eyes through which to see you, New Thoughts and Feelings by which to think and feel you!

When I go to touch your robe, my expressions grow weary from the effort to stretch out their hands, and a stiff, painful fatigue freezes in my words. And so the flight of a bird circles around what I wished to say about you, seeming to come nearer but never arriving, for the substance of my phrases cannot imitate the substance of your footsteps’ soft thudding, or of your glance’s slow sweeping, or of the sad, empty colour traced by the gestures you never made.

♦ And should I speak with someone far away, and should you who today are a cloud of the possible fall tomorrow as rain of reality over the earth, don’t ever forget your divine origin as my dream. Let whatever you are in real life serve as the dream of a loner, never as a lover’s refuge. Do your duty as a mere vessel. Fulfil your calling as a useless amphora. Let no one ever say of you what the river’s soul might say of its banks: that they exist to confine it. It were better not to flow in life, better to let the dream dry up.

May your essence consist in being superfluous, and may your life be the art of gazing at your life, of being gazed at, never identical. Don’t ever be anything more.

Today you are but a profile, created out of this book, a moment made incarnate and separated from other moments. If I were sure that’s what you are, I would found a religion on the dream of loving you.

You’re what everything is lacking. You’re what’s missing in each thing that would allow us to love it for ever. Lost key to the doors of the Temple, secret pathway to the Palace, distant Island forever hidden from view by the fog…