Springs

Springs have passed, by the dozens, but I don’t notice them anymore. Last night, she jumps around to reach the balcony as we hear the rain crackling the panels. “The first monsoon comes around May 20th,” she rejoices. I search, but cannot remember echoes or emotions from the coming of the first rains last year, or any year before that. She smiles, nostalging the hostel emptying itself to go run on the lawn, under the felicities of the weather. “It must take intense climates to keep populations so enthusiastic about its variations,” I comment. “We people don’t care that much about the weather.”

Weather, le temps, time, clouds passing across skies, years passing across calendars, irrespectively : aveugle au temps, fanatique du temps, ¹ once again les charmes du contradictoire m’emprisonnent. ² Regrets of the past and its mistakes, zigzags of the present, its impatience and its serenity, and the ecstasy of the future and its potentials, the fruits guaranteed by the sheer number of the years ahead.

Mon fétiche du temps, ³ commensurable time, hours and days are my currency, fil rouge de ma sur-vie ⁴ — some time back, I figured that my magnum opus, if not my first, would be a defence of the internal extension of time, sole resolution possibly untangling at once spiritual quests and intercultural deafnesses, along the geopolitical turning points of history.

But the clock is ticking, I like to repeat it à toutes les sauces, ⁵ my own grigri, another fetish exoticism of my French tongue adopting a tribal-sounding term from somewhere down in Africa, but the English speakers called the idea ‘lucky charm’, and indeed nowadays I realise that the sentiment of my time, my sentimental sentimentime, is my luck, ma bonne étoile, “lucky star”, once again, lucky charm, but this luck has ensured no particular charm to me so far, and I am still alone ou presque, ⁶ bragging of my destinal promises like a rapper or a prophet, only possible way to start getting heard — the one thing they got right, if none else. My long road started with a big bang : my lips, open.

I just feel that my minimal public image, filled all around it with a thorough anonymity, both equally miss the point, taking my persona for granted, blaming or praising me besides the point, besides my point, unable to see in me the turning point whose coming through me I can already intuit. Almost thirty springs, and they say that I took so long, that I am late and not all figured out, but my guts have figured it all, my future keeps in reserve the mastermind qui clouera des becs ⁷ et des tableaux de chasses. ⁸ Time is all I have, I am being in time, my being is only time. Time, of essence, time my essence.

Everyday, dawns and dusks line up before me, I stopped counting them, je ne peux m’interpeller plus de ne faire l’appel, ⁹ list-maker is all they all saw in me, but every such thing is just a medium for time, means for my ends, middle ground, half-field as I truly intend with resolve on reaching my end point. To-do lists and reminders are the pornography of my time, our sweet fantasies of the lives we will never have, but time has asked for me, waited for me, called me to wake me from my slumber, Samuel knows it too well, because the world had been waiting for it, for he the man who will just further mediate the cardinal message of time : time and its urgency, time and its infinite possibilities.

I could never dare to delusion that I would be a patient man, but life has taken me by surprise, and I discovered time’s widest playground behind my own hysteria. Take Plotinus for instance, we have been devouring each another for 50 days already, because indeed I try hard, I must understand the world and its history better, to learn and heal the tension of impatience, and the cardinal hours of time must have appeared themselves to many before me, and those souls too went to the words to recount their inner resolutions and inspire generations in turn. But precisely, meanwhile, I haven’t laid a word on the blank page for over two weeks. The clock is ticking, and, you see, everything with me is counted, timed, planned, listed and evaluated, because time is all that I care about — time and all it promises within. Time and the words will have been my two guardian angels — finding the words about time, and finding the time for the words, words to read, words to write, words to invent and to explode.

Funny coincidence, many moons before this page, I wake up from my habitual pre-somnic hallucinations, and for the first time, go get a notepad to write the following lines. It was hot and dry outside, no trace of a drop, but le temps et le temps, time and weather, already revealed their omnipresence, the clouds of time, grey-charged ahead, weighing above our heads like a sword of Damocles :

Il pleut chaque jour au coeur de moi,	It rains each day at the heart of me,
Il pleut chaque jour auprès de moi,	It rains each day beside me,
Par la serrure, ils m’ont vu, et me font pleurer	Through the keyhole, they saw me, and make me cry
Moi qui pleure,	Me, crying,
Mots qui pleurent,	Words, crying,
Faire pleurer les mots, à leur tour 10	Making the words cry, in turn

Et j’achève, ¹¹ cause I achieve :

Du rocher au roque,	From the rock to the castling,
Mon regal, 12 my treat : mon retour.	My regal, my treat : my return.

Image courtesy: Texture

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