Dominique Hecq: ‘ⱻ’
Dominique Hecq reading ‘ⱻ’
Si seulement je pouvais décrocher le soleil pendu à la rose incarnat qui dit oui qui dit non dans la chair du jour jaspée de l’autre côté de la fenêtre. Mais personne ne vient quand je sonne. Et d’ailleurs il doit y avoir erreur. Cette fenêtre me broie les os. La sisa mi molesta. Noli me tangere.
They say I can’t speak. Think I can’t hear.
Mais enfin, depuis son arrivée elle ne dit pas mot.
Ouais, une huitre.
Et on ne sait même pas son nom.
N’empêche, on est calées avec elle.
Calle, oh calle, oh liberté.
Il semble que ce n’est pas une femme, ni même une journée qu’il faut tenir enfermée, mais l’éternité.
L’ennui plus que l’incertitude arrête la vie comme si ce matin, midi, soir, avait pris un ultime congé de toute idée d’être.
Êtres, fantômes au présent, figés avant d’advenir dans le chiendent de la mémoire, les radicelles d’un possible été.
Il suffirait que ma main arrête la giration du temps pour que la parole me revienne comme une eau trop longtemps prise dans le gésier d’un oiseau prisonnier de la roche millénaire, effaçant toute différence entre roc, pierre, corail, os. Parole anesthésiée. Et tant plus. Vole !
¡ Le digo que no !
Si forte est ta maîtrise de soi que tu ne te laisses pas anesthésier et aussi vite te retrouves à la troisième personne dans une autre langue que celle de ta mère: safety, she says inside her own head or under her breath et il ne suffirait que d’ouvrir une fenêtre alors qu’il est déjà trop tard.
Calle, oh calle, oh freedom. El camino. Campo del mar.
¡ Le digo que no !
Les pierres semées sur le chemin sont plus vivantes que vivantes. Sa mémoire plus vivace que jamais et jamais plus proche que le grain de ta voix.
La mémoire n’est pas le seul chemin.
Memory is not the only way.
Never again does she want to hear remember me, car je n’a pas de corps à re-membrer ni d’esprit qui y soit collé. Encore moins calé.
Calle, oh calle, oh … ¡ Cállese !
Memory is too much unshuttered exposure to obsolescence.
Imagine. Cara E, che bello essere trasportato nella Via Lattea nell’incanto del tuo tempo.
Cracks across the ceiling split apart like the map of a river delta. Deep greens above the blond shock of hair are trees swaying on the river bank. Their trunks are carved of lines that come alive. They spread their dark roots beneath the ship of fools as though ready to lift it aloft. The edges of the poster are frayed; the top corner is creased and stained, and at the left-hand bottom corner it has curled so that you might reach over your arm to press it aright with your thumb if you could muster the courage. Water might then flow over the tiles, grow into a torrent and engulf you into recollections of things unlived.
Outside the sandman rakes pebbles and people break seashells on the pavement, slowly turning the suburbs into littered beaches. The sun is petrified lapis lazuli. The clouds unfold their petals where parks blossom like flying carpets. Flowers and bees shine under the sky’s vault. Clumps of violets rain on the earth twinkling like precious stones. A soldier plays the harp. Another drinks from a golden cup. A young man makes stirrups with his palms and lifts his beloved up onto Pegasus. A fickle old man’s heart breaks as his son blows his own trumpet and little children scatter like stones on the path. A woman kneels, counting on her fingers grains of salt that were her ears. Odeur de mimosa. Across from the billabong, Narcissus has fallen asleep. Suddenly I hear an echo and feel your glance flying towards me.
Noli me tangere.
Memories meld with the will to forget. You burn inside with the bite of frost, cling to the crooked finger of language and disappear with the tide into the uncreated dimension of your faraway voice. The ocean floor is a nocturnal moonscape of fractured rock, but like a tree in spring it is full of blossoms with petals curled upon shadows. Now that you are excarnated you imagine yourself glowing hot pink. You smell blood. Hear the rumble of labouring ships. [1] And soon you feel teeth sinking into the unflesh of you.
Hard as it is to imagine the Aegean casting off Orfeo’s bones, now silver water trailing in the Milky Way, his piroga song beading mother of pearl. you ask what is time, here, where the sea, relentless mouth fights for breath, shade, light, feeds on night plumes tangled in a mullioned sky of sheer absence and sucks at Bass Strait’s maelstrom of swirling white, here, where fine-grained limestone slopes, foam-crowned and crumbling, wash into blowholes as twilight seeps through furrowed rock wall awnings streaked with moonshine, here, with its howling onshore gale swathed in the roar of the booming surf, with its odour of kelp, salt hops, tea tree and rumours hovering in angel hair, or is it perhaps the mist, here, curling where Eurydice’s voice will all of a sudden break through the fractal arpeggios of sandpipers and cormorants pinking the shimmering breath of the sea as the sun sweeps its golden wave, here, across time and distance and absence with salt spray whipping the red green cliff and the hooked beak of a rock eagle at the point where your face turns to stone, bone, silver water, stardust
Difficile com'è d'immaginare il Mar Egeo rigettando le ossa di Orfeo ora l'acqua argentea trascina nella Via Lattea il suo canto di piroga che borda la madreperla vuoi sapere cos'è il tempo qui dove il mare, bocca implacabile combatte per fiato, ombra, luce si nutre di piume di notte aggrovigliate in un cielo con montanti buccati d'assenza e poppa il maelstrom di bianco vorticoso nello stretto di Bass, qui dove pendii calcarei a grana fine coronati di schiuma sbriciolano e irrompono in grande bucche di suggeritore mentre il crepuscolo dal canto suo vince pensiline di pietra solcata da marmoreo chiaro di luna, qui con il suo vento ululante del largo avvolto nello scatenarsi ruggente delle onde con l'odore di varech, arroche, tea tree e le sue voci che si librano in capelli d'angelo, o sara la nebbia, qui arriciata dove la voce di Euridice verrà all'improviso perforare gli arpeggi frattali di piovanelli e cormorani tingendo di rosa il respiro cangiante del mare mentre il sole infrange la sua onda d'oro, qui attraverso il tempo, la distanza e l'assenza con spruzzi salini che sferzano la scogliera verde rosso e il becco adunco di un'aquila di roccia nell'istante in cui il tuo viso diventa pietra, ossa, acqua d'argento, polvere di stelle
Dur comme il se doit d’imaginer la mer Egée rejetant les ossements d’Orfée sitôt eau argent ondoyant dans la Voie Lactée son chant pirogue perlant la nacre tu cherches à savoir ce qu’est le temps, ici où la mer, bouche implacable happe souffle, ombre, lumière avale plumes de nuit emmêlées dans un ciel à meneaux troué d’absence et tète le maelstrom tourbillonnant de blanc à Bass Strait, ici où des versants calcaires au grain fin couronnés d’écume s’éboulent et déferlent dans de grands trous de souffleur au crépuscule qui lui gagne les marquises de pierre sillonnées de marbrures de clair de lune, ici avec son vent du large ensaché dans le grondement des vagues déchainées avec son odeur de varech, arroche, arbre à thé et ses rumeurs virevoltant dans des cheveux d’ange, ou peut-être est-ce la brume, ici frisottant là où la voix d’Eurydice viendra tout d’un soudain percer les arpèges fractals des bécasseaux et des cormorans rosant le souffle chatoyant de la mer à l’instant où le soleil déferle sa lame d’or, ici par-delà temps et distance et absence avec le brouillard salin fouettant la falaise vert rouge et le bec crochu d’un aigle taillé dans la roche à l’instant où ton visage devient pierre, os, eau argent, poussière d’étoile.
Cara E, che bello essere trasportato nella Via Lattea nell’incanto del tuo canto. Trascriverò il tuo magico viaggio tenendo te e la preziosissima ⱻ per mano e le stringerò forte a me.
Memories meld with the will to forget. You burn inside with the bite of frost, cling to the crooked finger of language and disappear with the tide into the uncreated dimension of your faraway voice. The ocean floor is a nocturnal moonscape of fractured rock, but like a tree in spring it is full of blossoms with petals curled upon shadows. Now that you are excarnated you imagine yourself glowing hot pink. You smell blood. Hear the rumble of labouring ships.1 And soon you feel teeth sinking into the unflesh of you.
We concentrate avidly on the processes. Of writing, of desirous being, of ecstasy. We concentrate a great deal on the self. We exert ourselves, and in so doing we summon the other within ourselves to a reality that is transformed. Fiction seeks its own fictional subject and memory alone does not flinch. Memory makes oneself plural, essential, like the version that foreshadows an aerial vision. Authentic as a first written draft. With each page, the necessary willingness to start over. [2]
Overnight they will strip your room of the varnished floorboards and whitewashed walls, leaving you with thinly papered tongues across the spaces between what may be housing words devoid of their after images. There will be a silent wireless on the veranda and the loud thump of a corps à corps you recall from a silent painting by Eugène Delacroix. And all of a sudden, you will find yourself in the market square with the artist crossing lips that may be yours. You will pick a jam jar full of coloured morphemes and phonemes from the souvenirs stall. Spit will spill and spatter and light the sun at the exact point where meaning runs away with ribbons of grey clouds cut in lavender-polished air. You’ll squint. See the sun hanging not from a crimson rose in jasper flesh, but from a black poppy caught in onyx epithelium.
Notes
[1] The phrase ‘the labouring ships’ is from W. B. Yeats, ‘The Sorrow of Love’, in Selected Poems, A. Norman Jeffares (ed), Macmillan, 1974, p. 17.
[2] The italicised quote is taken with permission from Nicole Brossard, ‘The Aerial Letter’, in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud and Erin Wunker (eds), Coach House, 2020, p. 78.
Translation
Translation (opens in a new window).
Photo credit: Michael Reynolds
Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She now lives on unceded sovereign Wurundjeri land, Melbourne. Hecq writes across genres and disciplines—and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works include a novel, five collections of short stories and twelve books of poetry. A runner up in the Carmel Bird Literary Digital Award, Smacked and Other Stories of Addiction is fresh off the press. The second edition of After Cage: A Composition in Word and Movement on Time and Silence has also been released (Liquid Amber Press).