The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico

Начало книги

Hypochondria, insomnia, restlessness and yearning are the lame muses of these brief pages. I would have liked to call them Extravaganzas, not so much for their style, as because many of them seem to wander about in a strange outside that has no inside, like drifting splinters, survivors of some whole that never was. Alien to any orbit, I have the impression they navigate in familiar spaces whose geometry nevertheless remains a mystery; let’s say domestic thickets: the interstitial zones of our daily having-to-be, or bumps on the surface of existence.

Then some of these pages, as for example “The Archives of Macao” and “Past Composed: Three Letters,” are eccentric even on their own terms, refugees from the idea that originated them. To the extent that they are fragments of novels and stories, they are no more than meagre conjectures, or spurious projections of desire. They have a larval nature: they present themselves like creatures under formalin, with the oversize eyes of organisms still in the foetal stage — questioning eyes. But questioning whom? What do they want? I don’t know if they’re really questioning anyone, nor if they want anything, but I feel it would be kinder to ask nothing of them, since I believe that asking questions is the prerogative of those beings Nature has not brought to completion: it is that which is clearly incomplete that has the right to ask questions. Still, I cannot deny that I love them, these sketchy compositions entrusted to a notebook which out of an unconscious sort of faithfulness I have carried around with me constantly these last few years.

Читать дальше →