160.

As we center our reflections on the problems of lived space, 
miniature raises for us images of vision exclusively.  

But the causality of the small riots the senses, 
and we must make, apropos of each sense, 

a study of its 'miniatures'.  For sense, 
as for taste and scent, the problem will be 

perhaps even more interesting than that of vision.  
Vision cuts short its dramas.  But a trace of perfume,

an infintesimal odor, can determine 
a genuine climate in the imaginary world. 

  poetics of space,         

"miniature"             

99.

And the threshold, here, is the welcoming threshold,
 the threshold that does not impose by its majesty.  
The two images: the calm nest and the old house, 
weave on the loom of dreams the thick web of intimacy.  

And the images are entirely simple, with no concern 
for the picturesque.  The poet has rightly felt that a sort 
of musical harmony would take hold in the soul 
of his reader by the evocation of the nest, of birdsong, 

of the charms that remind us of the old house, the primary dwelling.  
But by so gently comparing house and nest, have we not forgotten 
the house of happiness?  There is an alas in this song of tenderness.  
If we return to the old house as a return to the nest, it means

that memories are dreams, that the house of the past has become 
a grand image, the grand image of lost intimacies.  

the poetics of space               

1. ILLUSIONS

HIDING

Certain linguists aggressively cling to the communicative function of language: language serves to communicate.  Same prejudice with archaeologists, writing's historians: writing serves to transmit.  They must admit that, in all evidence, language has sometimes (always?) served to hide what has been entrusted to it.  If pictography is a simple, particularly clear system, by moving towards a difficult, complex, abstract system, diversified into numerous graphic registers, often at the limit of the decipherable (cuneiform ideography), Sumerian scribes abandoned readability in favor of a certain opacity.  Cryptography would then be the very vocation of writing.  Illegibility, far from being the inadequate, monstrous state of the scriptural system, would on the contrary be the truth (the essence of a practice may be at its limit, not at its center).

The reasons for this occultation may be diverse, varying according to places, epochs: religious reasons if it has to do with an initiatory relation, jealously cut off from all contact with the profane, from a taboo communication with the gods; social reasons, if it has to do with insuring the caste of the scribes, itself representative of a certain social class (the one that was in power), the protection of certain secrets, certain informations, certain proprieties.  We are habituated, by the weight of democratic values (and perhaps more distantly: Christian values) to consider spontaneously the greatest communication as a given fact and writing as a progressive gain.  This is to forget once again phenomenon's reverse: there is a dark truth of writing: writing, over the millenia, has separated those who were initiated, few in number, from those who were not (the majority), it has been the mark of propriety (via the signature) and of distinction (there are primal, vulgar writings and there are cultivated writings).  Even today, every phenomenon takes possession of a kind of writing (algorithms of mathematics, of chemistry, of botany; musical, symbolic, astrological writing; as soon as a science begins to take form, its promoters invent for it a graphic hermeticism: and so it is today with the semiotic narrative whose récit is dressed in graphic symbols); in the order of the manuscript (which, it is true, is losing ground) the more difficult a manuscript is to read, the more it is called "personal," returning to the impenetrable status of the individual.  Consequently, the graphic imaginations of certain painters, in as much as they have produced absolutely, definitively indecipherable writings (and for good reason), such as Masson and Réquichot, should never be seen as aberrations; they are instead manifestations of the other side - of the hell - of writing (the truth is in the inversion). 

part three of an unpublished text 
 written in February 1973

VARIATIONS ON WRITING

In the past, the primary object that I met with in my work was writing; but I understood this word then in a metaphorical sense: it was for me a variety of literary style, its collective version, as it were, the ensemble of linguistic traits according to which a writer assumes the historical responsibility of its form and becomes attached by way of its verbal work to a certain ideology of language.  Today, twenty years later, in a sort of return to the body, I would like to move towards the manual sense of the word; it's "scription" (the muscular act of writing, of tracing letters) that interests me: the gesture by which the hand takes an instrument (awl, reed, plume), presses it against a surface, advances with pressure or a caress, and traces forms that are regulated, recurring, rhythmic (we needn't say more: let us not necessarily speak  of "signs").  The gesture will be our subject here, and not the metaphoric acceptations of the word "writing": we will speak only of the written manuscript, that which bears the trace of the hand. 

What can be said of this writing?  We will be particularly concerned with assembling what could be called a dossier of manual writing: historical and technical information, points of contact between the object "writing" and different fields of knowledge (with different prejudices), the structuring of certain graphic systems, the social and economic stakes of the activity of writing, the relations between the scriptural gesture and the body.  This dossier, the author understands, remains rather personal: issuing from readings cited sometimes quasi-literally and that most often concern (he begs the pardon of Italian readers) the French domain: I have read and taken note of what touched my intellectual sensibility.  I have not attempted to organize, to cloak this dossier in a continuous discourse, to produce a personal "thesis" on writing; what mattered to me was in some way to provide myself with suspensive reflections or, to be exact, questions.  The body of these questions, then, has no demonstrative value; it is nevertheless pregnant with a certain meaning: it indicates that writing, historically, is a continually contradictory activity articulated on a double postulation: on the one hand, it is a strictly mercantile object, an instrument of power and segregation; and on the other hand, it is a practice of jouissance, bound to the drives and intensities of the body and to the most subtle and skilled artistic productions. This is the weave of the scriptural text.  I do nothing here but arrange, spread out the threads.  It is up to you to create the design.  
  

part one of an unpublished text 
 written in February 1973

I said to myself, then, that this disorder and this dilemma, brought to light by the desire to write about Photography, reflected a kind of discomfort that I've always felt : being a subject caught between two languages, one expressive, the other critical, and at the heart of this second language, between several discourses, those of sociology, semiology and psychoanalysis -- but that, because of the dissatisfaction that I finally found with all of them, I bore witness to the only certain thing that existed in me (as naive as it was): a passionate resistance to any reductive system.  For each time that I resorted to any such language, feeling it to coalesce, to slide into reduction and reprimand, I softly left it and looked elsewhere: I began to speak in another way.  It was better, once and for all, to turn my protestation of singularity into a virtue, and attempt to make the "ancient sovereignty of the self" (Nietzsche) into a heuristic principle.  I then resolved to take for my point of departure only several photos, those that I was sure existed for me.  Nothing to do with a corpus: only some bodies.  In this entirely conventional debate between subjectivity and science, this bizarre idea came to me: why shouldn't there be, in some way, a new science for each object?  A mathesis singularis (and not universalis)?  I then decided to use myself as mediator for all of Photography: I would attempt to formulate, starting from certain personal reactions, the fundamental trait, the universal without which there would be no Photography.

  from         

Camera Lucida

   

An old house, a porch in shadow, some tiles, a faded Arabic decoration, a man seated against a wall, a deserted street, a Mediterranean tree (Charles Clifford's "Alhambra"): this old photo moves me: quite simply that it's there where I'd like to live.  This longing touches me deeply, at roots that are unfamiliar to me: the heat of the climate? Mediterranean myth, Appollinism? Defection? Retreat? Anonymity? Nobility? Whatever it may be (regarding myself, my motives, my fantasy), I want to live there, en finesse, a finesse that will never be satisfied by the tourist photograph.  For me, landscape photographs (urban or rural) must be habitable, and not visitable.  This desire to inhabit, if I observe it closely in myself, is neither oneiric (I am not dreaming of some extravagant site) or empirical (I'm not looking to buy a house from the views of a real-estate agency); it is fantasmatic, relating to a kind of seeing that seems to carry me ahead, towards a utopic time, or to bring me back, I don't know where, inside myself: the double movement that Baudelaire praises in Invitation au voyage and La Vie antérieure.  Before these landscapes of predilection, everything takes place as if I were sure of having been there or of going there.  Freud says of the maternal body that "there is no other place of which one may say with as much certitude that one has already been there."   Such would then be the essence of the landscape (chosen by desire): heimlich, awakening in me the Mother (not in the slightest bit worrisome).

from Camera Lucida             

What does my body know of Photography?  I have observed that a photo may the object of three practices (or of three emotions, or of three intentions): doing, enduring, seeing.  The Operator is the photographer, the Spectator is all of us who consult, in newspapers, books, and archives, photographic collections.  And the one or the thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, of an eidolon emitted by the object that I will call the Spectrum of Photography, because this word holds at its root a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it the slightly terrible thing that exists in every photograph: the return of the dead.

from Camera Lucida             

Every great, simple image is revelatory of a state of being.  The house, even more than the landscape, is a "state of being."  Even as a reproduction of its exterior aspect, it speaks of an intimacy.  Psychologists, Francoise Minkowska in particular, have studied drawings of houses done by children, and have made of them a kind of of a test.  This house-test has the advantage of being open to spontaneity, since many children spontaneously draw while dreaming, pencil in hand, of a house.  And so, says, Mme Balif, "Asking a child to draw a house is to ask him to reveal the most profound dream in which he wishes to shelter his happiness; if he is happy, he will know how to draw an enclosed and protected space, a solid and profoundly rooted dwelling."  The house will be drawn in its form, but almost always, some trait will designate an inner strength.  In certain drawings, it is evident that, says Mme Balif, "it is warm on the inside, and there is a fire, a fire so strong that it can be seen escaping from the chimney."  When the house is a happy one, smoke softly dances above its rooftop. 

the poetics of space,            

"house and universe"           

In this drama of intimate geometry, where shall we live?
Does not the philosopher's advice to retreat into oneself  
in order to become situated in existence lose its value, 
even its meaning, when the most supple image of being-there 
has just been experienced as the poet's ontological nightmare?
 Let us take note that this nightmare does not. . . {unintelligible}. . . 

Fear does not originate from the outside.
Nor is it made from old memories. 
It has no past.
It has no body.
Nothing in common with the philosophy of breathlessness.
Fear here is being itself.  

If so, where to flee, where to take refuge? 
Into, towards, what refuge may we escape?  

poetics of space               

"the dialectics of outside and inside"       

The reader who is not in a rush -- the only reader we could ever hope for -- will surely enter into the reverie of miniature.  This idle reader has often enjoyed such daydreams, but never dared to write them down.  The poet has given them literary dignity; we wish -- grand ambition! -- to give them their philosophical dignity.  For, in the end, the poet is not mistaken, he has discovered a world.  "Here, too, existed a world."  Why should the metaphysician not confront that world?  It would allow him, at little cost, the experience of "opening to the world," "entrance into the world."  Too often, the world designated by philosophy is nothing but a non-self.  Its vastness is a mass of negativities.  The philosopher passes too quickly to the positive and appropriates the World, a unique World.  The formulas: being-in-the-world, being of the world are too majestic for me; I can't manage to live them.  I am more at ease in miniature worlds; they are, for me, dominated worlds.  Living in them, I feel world-making waves pouring from my dreaming self.  The vastness of the world is no longer anything for me but the jamming of these waves.  Miniature, sincerely lived, detaches me from the surrounding world, helps me to resist the dissolution of the surrounding atmosphere.   

poetics of space           

"miniature"             

Take note that few dreamers of nests are fond of the nests of the swallow, made, they say, of saliva and mud.  We ask ourselves, where could these swallows have lived, before there were houses and cities?  The swallow is not, then, a "regular" bird; Charbonneaux-Lassay writes: "I've heard peasants in the Vendée claim that a swallow's nest could scare the night-devils away, even in winter." 

poetics of space, 

"the nest"    

And so, values transform facts.  As soon as an image is loved, it can no longer be the copy of a fact.  One of the greatest dreamers of winged life, Michelet, offers us proof of this: while he consecrates only a few pages to "the architecture of birds," these pages think and dream at once.  

The bird, says Michelet, is a worker stripped of all tools.  He has neither "the hand of the squirrel, nor the tooth of the beaver."  "The tool, in fact, is the bird himself, his chest that presses and squeezes its materials until they are made to surrender, blend and adapt to the work as a whole." And Michelet suggests to us a house constructed by the body, for the body, taking its shape from the interior, like a shell, in an intimacy that physically works.  It's the inside of the nest that demands its form.  And the instrument that imposes on the nest its circular form is nothing other than the body of the bird.  By constantly turning and turning the wall from all sides, it comes to form its circle.  The female, like a living tower, hollows out her house.  The male bring from the outside the disparate materials, solid twigs and pieces.  From all this, by an active pressure, the female makes felt. 

Michelet continues: the house is the bird's person himself, his form and effort in the most immediate sense: I would even say, his suffering.  The result is achieved only by the constantly repeated pressure of the breast.  Not one of these blades of grass that, to keep and protect the curve, hasn't been pushed a million times over by the breast, the heart, certainly accompanied by trouble in breathing, perhaps even palpitations.  

What an unbelievable inversion of images!  Is this not the breast created by the embryo?  Everything is pressure from the inside, with intimacy physically dominating.  The nest is a fruit that swells to fill, to press against its limits.  

From the depths of what reveries do such images rise?  Do they not originate from the dream of the protection closest to us, a protection tailored to our own bodies?  Dreams of the house-garment are not unknown to those who indulge in the imaginary exercise of the function of inhabiting.  By working at our dwelling in the way that Michelet dreams of his nest, we would not be wearing the ready-made garment so often marked as a bad sign by Bergson.  We would find the personal dwelling, the nest of our body, tailor-made to our form.  When, after life's tests and trials, Colas Breugnon, the hero of Romain Rolland's novel, is offered a larger, more accomodating house, he refuses it as if it were a suit that was the wrong size, saying, "Either it would gape all around me, or I would make it burst at the seams." 
  

poetics of space, 

"the nest"    

TEARS.  

Particular propensity of the lover to cry: 
modes of appearance and function of tears 
in this subject. 

1.  The slightest amorous emotion, of happiness or of ennui, brings Werther to tears.  Werther often, very often, cries, and cries abundantly.  Is it the lover who cries in Werther, or the romantic? 

Could this be a disposition of the amorous type, to abandon himself himself to tears?  In submission to the Imaginary, he thumbs his nose at the present-day censure that keeps the adult in exile from tears, and by which a man must protest his virility (Piaf's maternal compassion and satisfaction: "Mais, vous pleurez, Milford!") By liberating his tears from constraint, he follows the orders of the amorous body, which is a bathed body, a fluid expansiveness: crying together, flowing together: delectable tears consummate the reading of Klopstock that Charlotte and Werther perform together.  Where does the lover claim the right to tears, if not in a reversal of values whose first target is the body?  He accepts the rediscovery of the infant

What's more, here, the amorous body is the double of a historical body.  Who will write the history of tears?  In which societies, in which eras have we cried?  At which point did men (and not women) stop crying? Why, at a certain point in time, did "sensitivity" become "sentimentality"?  The images we have of virility are unstable: the Greeks, men of the 17th century often cried at the theatre.  Saint-Louis, according to Michelet, suffered from not having received the gift of tears.  Once he finally felt tears softly rolling down his cheeks, "they felt so delightful and so soft, not only to the heart but to the lips".  (Similarly: in 1199, a young monk set off for a Cisternian abbey in Brabant to receive, by their prayers, the gift of tears.)

(Nietzchean problem: how do History and Type combine?  Is it not the work of the type to formulate - to form - what in History is timeless, out-of-time?  In the lover's tears, our society represses its own timelessness, making of the lover who cries a lost soul whose repression is necessary for his "health."  In the film, The Marquise of O, the lovers cry, and the audience laughs.) 

2.  Perhaps "crying" is too general: perhaps we shouldn't attribute the same signification to every kind of tears; perhaps in the same lover there exist numerous subjects that engage in neighboring, but different modes, of "crying."   Who is this "me" who has tears in his eyes?  Who is this other that, one day, brings me "to the brink of tears"?  Who am I who cries "all the tears in my body"? or who sheds, upon waking, "a torrent of tears"?  If I have all of these modes of crying, it is perhaps because, when I cry, I am always addressing another, and that the address of my tears is not always the same: I adapt my modes of crying to a kind of blackmail that, by my tears, I intend to enact around me. 

3.  By crying, I want to make an impression on someone, pressure him ("Look what you've done to me!")  This could be - and commonly is - a way to force the other to openly admit his commiseration or insensitivity: but it could also be myself: I make myself cry, to prove to myself that my grief is not an illusion: tears are signs, not expressions.  With my tears, I tell a story, I create a myth of grief, and as soon as I have, I can live with it, because by crying, I give myself an emphatic interlocutor who receives the "realest" of messages, that of my body, not of my language: "Words, what are words?  One tear could say more."  

{A Lover's Discourse}                    

The nest-house is never young.  Once could say, in a pedantic way, that it is the natural habitat of the function of inhabiting.  One returns to it, once dreams of returning to it like the bird returns to the nest, like the lamb returns to the fold.  This sign of return marks infinite reveries, for human returns occur in the grand rhythm of human life, a rhythm that transcends the years and that, by dreaming, battles with absence.  As the images of house and nest are drawn together, an intimate composition of fidelity takes hold.     

Everything happens, in this domain, in simple and delicate touches.  The soul is so sensitive to these simple images that it hears all of its resonances in a harmonic reading.  On a conceptual level, the reading would be insipid, cold, linear; it would ask us to understand the images one after another.  And in the domain of the image of the nest, the traits are so simple we are surprised that the poet could become enchanted by them.  But simplicity grants forgetfulness, and all at once we are grateful to the poet who finds, with a rare touch, the talent to reimagine it.  How could the phenomenologist not respond to this renewal of a simple image?  And so we read, with a full heart, the simple poem written by Jean Caubère entitled, Le nid tiède [The warm nest].  The poem seems even more meaningful when we consider that it appeared in an austere book written under the sign of the desert (Jean Caubère, Deserts):

The warm, calm nest
Whose bird sings

Recalls the songs, the charms
The pure threshold
Of the old house.

The threshold, here, is a welcoming threshold, a threshold whose majesty does not impose on us.  The two images, the calm nest and the old house, weave a thick web of intimacy on the loom of dreams.   They are completely simple images, with no concern for the picturesque.  The poet rightly sensed that, with the invocation of the nest, of birdsong, the charms that lead us back to the old house, the primary dwelling, a sort of musical chord would strike in the reader's soul.  But, in order to compare house and nest with such gentleness, mustn't we have forgotten the house that sheltered happiness?  There is an alas in this song of tenderness.  If we return to the old house as if to a nest, it is because memories are dreams, it is because the house of our past has become an image, a great image of lost intimacies.  

It's likely that, these days, laziness consists not in doing nothing, since we are incapable of that, but in cutting time as often as possible, in diversifying it.  That's what I do in my own little way when I introduce diversions into my work.  I cut time.  It's a way of surrendering to laziness.  And yet, I aspire to another kind of indolence. 

A Zen poem, which always dazzles me with its simplicity, is perhaps the poetic definition of the kind of idleness I dream of:

         Assis paisiblement sans rien faire
         le printemps vient
         et l'herbe croit d'elle-meme

         Sitting peacefully, doing nothing
         springtime comes
         and the grass grows by itself

The poem, as it is translated in French, presents an admirable anacoluthon, a rupture in its construction.  The one who sits is not the subject of the phrase.  It isn't springtime who is sitting.  This rupture of construction, whether intentional or no, indicates that, in laziness' circumstance, the subject is almost dispossessed of his consistency as subject.  He is decentered, he can't even say, "I".  This would be true laziness.  To manage, at certain moments, to no longer have to say "I". 

Wouldn't the amorous subject be searching for this kind of laziness the most?  

The laziness sought after by the amorous subject is not only to "do nothing,"  but to "decide nothing." 

In one Fragment [of A Lover's Discourse] entitled, "What to do?" I wrote that the amorous subject, at certain times, tries to carve out for himself, in the perpetual tension that passion represents for him, "a little corner of laziness." 

In fact, the lover that I was trying to describe is faced with questions of conduct at every turn: should I telephone?  Should I go to the rendezvous?  Should I not go?  

I recalled that the "What to do?", that is to say, the fabric of deliberations and decisions of which, perhaps, our life is made, resembles Buddhist karma, the chains of causes that incessantly compel us to act, to respond.  The opposite of karma is nirvana.  We may, while suffering from karma, postulate, fantasize a sort of nirvana.  Laziness then takes on a dimension of annihilation.  

True laziness would be at its core a laziness of "not-deciding," of "being-there."  Like dunces at the bottom of the class, who have no other attribute than being there. 

They don't participate, they aren't excluded, they're just there, full stop.  

One wants that sometimes: to be there, to decide nothing.  There is, I think, a Taoist teaching on laziness, in the sense of "not moving," not determining.  

We could also go back to certain temptations in Tolstoy's morality, insofar as we could ask ourselves if we have the right to be lazy in the face of evil.  Tolstoy responded, Yes, this is in fact is the best answer, since we mustn't respond to one evil with another.  

It's unnecessary to tell you that this morality has now been totally discredited.  If we were to take it even further, laziness could be seen as a high philosophical solution to evil.  To not respond.  But once again, our current society doesn't handle neutral attitudes very well.  Laziness is intolerable, as if it were fundamentally the principal evil.  

What's terrible about laziness is that it is perhaps the most banal, stereotyped thing, the least considered thing in the world, when it could be the most considered thing.  It could be an ease, but also a conquest.   

from "Dare to be Lazy,"

interview with Monde Dimanche,

16 september 1979

RECOLLECTION: 

happy and/or harrowing remembrance of an object, a gesture, a scene 
tied to the loved one and marked by the intrusion of the imperfect tense 
into the grammar of the lover's discourse.  

1.

"We are having a magnificent summer and I am often in Lotte's orchard, perched in the trees, a long pole in hand to strip the pears from their branches.  She, down below, catches them as I send them to her." 

Werther, narrates, speaks in the present tense, but his tableau is already doing the work of memory: the imperfect murmurs in a low voice behind this present.  One day, I will remember this scene, I will lose myself in the past.  The lovers' scene, just as in the first ravishing, is created only by aftershocks: it is anamnesis, found only in insignificant, hardly dramatic traits, as if I remembered only time and time itself, a perfume without a medium, a grain of memory, a simple fragrance; something like pure expenditure, the kind that the Japanese haiku alone knows how to express, without recuperating it in any future.  

(We used to have, to catch the figs in high branches in B.'s garden, a long pole made of bamboo and a tin funnel stamped with florets that was attached to it.  This childhood memory functions like an amorous one.)

2. 

"The stars were shining."  Never again will this happiness return as such.  Anamnesis fills me up and tears me apart. 

The imperfect is the tense of fascination: it has the air of being alive, and yet never moves: imperfect presence, imperfect death; neither forgetting nor resurrection, simply the exhausting lure of memory.  From the origin, eager to play a role, scenes position themselves in memory: often, I sense this, predict it, at the very moment in which they take shape. -- This theatre of time is the very opposite of the search for lost time; for I remember pathetically, punctually, and not philosophically, discursively; I remember in order to feel happy or unhappy -- not in order to understand.  I do not write, I do not lock myself away to write the enormous novel of time regained.  

           {A Lover's Discourse}                

Just as I was having these thoughts, just as I was having these dreams, I read in the Cahiers G. L. M. a page which supports my axiom that makes a world of the nest, that makes the nest the center of a world.  Boris Pasternak speaks of "the instinct, with the aid of which, like the swallow, we construct the world -- an enormous nest, an agglomerate of earth and sky, of death and life, and of two kinds of time, one that is available and one that is lacking to us."  Yes, two kinds of time, for what a long time, in fact, it will take for us to be able, from the center of our intimacy, to spread waves of tranquility that will travel to the limits of the world.  

      {poetics of space, the nest}                  

     We have no need, in order to live this trust so profoundly inscribed in sleep, to ennumerate the material reasons for it.  The nest, as much as the oneiric house, and the oneiric house as much as the nest -- if we are at the origins of our own dreaming -- are not familiar with the hostilities of the world.  Life begins for man in deep sleep; all of the nest's eggs are well covered.  Our experience of the world's hostility-- and by consequence, our dreams of defense and aggressiveness -- will come later.  In its germinal form, all life is well-being.  Being begins with well-being.  In his contemplation of the nest, the philosopher calms himself by meditating on his being in the peaceful being of the world.  If we were to translate the absolute naiveté of his reverie into the metaphysical language of today, the dreamer might say: the world is the nest of man.  

     The world is a nest -- an immense force keeps the beings of the world in this nest.  In his History of Hebrew Poetry, Herder gives an image of the immense sky resting on the immense earth: "The air," he says, "is a dove, who, resting on his nest, warms his children." 

     Delving deeper into our dreams of nests, we soon collide with a kind of paradox of sensibility.  The nest -- we understand this right away -- is precarious, and yet it triggers in us a reverie of security.  Why does this evident instability not shut down such reverie?  The answer to this paradox is simple: we dream as phenomenologists, without knowing it.  We relive, in a sort of naiveté, the instinct of birds.  We take pleasure in accentuating the mimicry of the green nest in green foliage.  We saw it, certainly, but said it was well hidden.  This center of animal life is hidden by the immense volume of plant life.  The nest is a bouquet of leaves in song.  It participates in the peace of the vegetable kingdom.  It is a mark in the ambient happiness of tall trees.  

     A poet writes: 
           I dreamt of a nest whose branches repusled death

     And so, while contemplating the nest, we are at the origin of trust in the world, we obtain the beginning of a trust, a call to the cosmic trust.  Would the bird construct his nest if he had no instinct of confidence in the world?  If we hear this call, if we make of this precarious shelter that is the nest an absolute refuge -- paradoxically, no doubt, but the imagination impels us to do so -- we return to the sources of the oneiric house.  Our house, understood in its oneiric power, is a nest in the world.  We will live there in a native confidence if, in our dreams, we truly participate in the security of the primary dwelling.  

     Nature has a very simple way of amazing us: by enlargement.  With the shell commonly known as the Grand Bénitier, we see Nature enacting an immense dream of protection, a delirium of protection, ending in a monstrosity of protection.  The mollusk "weighs only 14 pounds, but the weight of each of its valves is between 250 and 300 kilograms, measuring from one meter to a meter and a half in length." (Armand Landrin, Marine Monsters, 2nd edition, Hachette, 1879, p. 16.)  The author of this book, part of the famous Library of Marvels, adds, "In China. . . wealthy Mandarins own bathtubs made from these shells."  What a mollifying bath must one experience in the house of such a shell!  What capacity for relaxation must an animal of only 14 pounds feel while occupying so much space!  I know nothing of biological realities.  I am only a bookish dreamer.  But when I read a page of Armand Lanrin I am possessed by a grand, cosmic dream.  Who wouldn't feel cosmically comforted by imagining taking a bath in the shell of the Grand Bénitier?

         {the poetics of space, shells}