The Demon of Analogy

Have unknown words sung upon your lips, accursed flitters of an absurd phrase?

 

I left my apartment with just the feeling of a wing gliding over the strings of an instrument, trailing and light, which was replaced by a voice pronouncing the words on a descending note: “The Penultimate is dead”, in such a way that

 

The Penultimate

 

finished the verse and

 

Is dead

 

                                                                                           broke off from the fatidic suspension more uselessly in the void of signification. I stepped off into the street and knew again in the sound null the taut string of the musical instrument, which was forgotten and which glorious Memory certainly came to visit with its wing or with a palm and, finger on the artifice of mystery, I smiled and implored with intellectual wishes a different speculation. The phrase came back, virtual, out of an anterior fall of branch or feather, henceforth through the voice discerned, until in the end it spoke itself, alive with its personality. I went on (no longer contenting myself with a perception) reading to the end of the verse, and, once, adapting it to my utterance; soon pronouncing it with a silence after “Penultimate” in which I found a sore pleasure: “The Penultimate” then the string of the instrument, so taut in oblivion over the sound null, broke without doubt and I added like a prayer: “Is dead”. I kept on trying to return to thoughts in predilection, alleging, to calm myself, that, of course, penultimate is the lexical term that means the next-to-last syllable of vocables, and its apparition, the ill-abjured remnant of a linguistic labor for which daily sobs to be broken off my noble poetic faculty: the very sonority and the lying air assumed by the haste of the facile affirmation were a cause of torment. Worried, I resolved to let the words of nature sad wander freely on my mouth, and I went on murmuring with an intonation susceptible of condolence: “The Penultimate is dead, it is dead, quite dead, the desperate Penultimate”, thinking thus to satisfy inquietude, and not without the secret hope of burying it in the amplification of the psalmody when, frightful!—by a magic easily deducible and nervous—I felt that I had, my hand reflected in a shop window there making the gesture of a caress that descends upon some thing, the very voice (the first, which indubitably had been the only one).

 

But where set in the irrefutable intervention of the supernatural, and the beginning of the anguish under which agonizes my onetime lordly spirit was when I saw, raising my eyes, in the street of antique dealers instinctively taken, that I was before the shop of a lutemaker selling old instruments hung on the wall, and, on the floor, yellow palms and wings gone off in shadow, of ancient birds. I fled, bizarre, a person condemned to wear probably mourning for the inexplicable Penultimate.

 

Stéphane Mallarmé