The Future Phenomenon
A pallid sky, above the world that ends from
decrepitude, will perhaps depart with the clouds: the tatters of the worn-out
purple of sunsets fade in a river sleeping to the horizon submerged in rays
and water. The trees are bored and, under their whited leaves (from the dust
of time rather than of roadways), rises the canvas house of the Showman of Things
Past: many a streetlamp awaits the dusk and revives the faces of an unhappy
crowd, vanquished by the immortal malady and the sin of the ages, of men
close to their puny accomplices pregnant with the miserable fruits the earth
will die from. In the unquiet silence of all the eyes supplicating yonder the
sun which, under the water, sinks with the despair of a cry, behold the
simple patter: “No sign regales you with the interior spectacle, for
there is now not one painter capable of giving one sad shadow of it. I bring,
living (and preserved across the years by sovereign science) a Woman of
bygone days. Some madness, original and naïve, an ecstasy of gold, I know not
what! by her called her hair, plies itself with the grace of fabrics around a
face lit by the blood-red nudity of her lips. In place of vain vestments, she
has a body; and her eyes, like rare stones, are not worth the look that comes
from her happy flesh: from her breasts raised as if they were full of a milk
eternal, tips toward the sky, to her lissome legs that keep the salt of the
first sea.” Recalling their poor spouses, bald, morbid and full of
horror, the husbands press: the women as well out of curiosity, melancholy,
wish to see. When all have contemplated the noble
creature, vestige of some epoch already accursed, some indifferent, for they have
not had the strength to comprehend, but others broken and their eyelids moist
with resigned tears will look at each other; while the poets of those times,
feeling rekindled their extinguished eyes, will head for their lamp, their
brains drunk a moment with a confused glory, haunted with Rhythm and in
forgetfulness of existing in an epoch that survives beauty. |
Stéphane Mallarmé