Hilda Hilst - With My Dog Eyes

Blabbering immobile

I make a speech right here

Staring at my shoes.

Toad-man untying his veins

I’m far away, high

As befits

A man who wants to jump free

Of his chains.

My suffocated echo:

A moonlit uomo

Rosso de Nuovo

Warmth in my bones. The sun’s coming out. I grapple with myself, I set off a fight. I and my someones, the ones they say have nothing to do with reality. And it’s only this I have: I plus I. I understand nothing. My nothings, my vomits, to exist and understand nothing. To have existed and to have suspected an iridescence, a sun beyond all selves. Beyond all yous. Amós Kéres. Frank and fervent but renouncing in this instant Amanda, kiddo, university. Kiddo, yes, like a little goat-doe. Kiddo’s a word I owe to Márcia, that colleague of mine from the university, mathematician and politician, did field work in Paris, later said to hell with it, got married and was always saying: kiddos, Amós, kiddos are the sum of life. As I saw. I saw Amanda’s breast sucked dry, the kid a little animal, little digging hands. Is God a woman? How I’ve sucked the breast I can’t see. I go it alone, leprous. The sow is God. All stretched out too. Dreaming. hilde and her little eyes the color of artichoke. Smooth-ribbed and innocent. The artichoke has everything to do with God. They forget. Models of interpretation. The logos is this: pain old age neglect of the living, then death. I was lucid and alert. And almost pious. I understood little of men and women. Of kiddos too. Little. Incomplete beings repeating idiocies. I am a child-person, lucid geezer, compassionate and sweet. Amós Kéres. Innocent as a little animal-child gazing On High. But they say the On High is nothing and that you need to watch your step. Your ass too. With a mirror. I’m looking. Unforgettable grotesque condition. Oh, I want the face of He who lives inside Amós, the Immortal, the Iridescent-Shining, the perceiver-Perceived. I’ll say with precision what my non-comprehending is. Of majestic meaning. Colorful. Dilated. Wearing gloves too. The ones that are elbow-high. Amanda wore them one night. You could see only smooth kid leather. Nothing of flesh. Even less of bone. A worm at the core someone said. That scary Otto Rank? The no less frightening William James? I go on: they keep beating off, reading the newspaper, or fucking and reading the newspaper, or trying to do business, acting. Or stealing. Always acting. And they’ll have expenses fridges houses TVs airplanes. Later more cars more fridges freezers houses computers robots gold dollars, leisure and pleasure. Amós. The sparkling mirror. Is there blood here? Apparently not. There’s only blood after. Like a tried-and-true formula. Blood at the core of the Unfounded. There’s blood there too. That order from above, that non-clarity reaches me, and at bottom the rivering blood, roiling. I descend into the glassy gorge. Amós Kéres. From here I can hear him comparing the lucidity of an instant to the opacity of infinite days, I can hear him thinking of the various manners of madness and suicide. The madness of the Search, which is made of concentric circles and never arrives at the center, the obscuring, incarnate illusion of finding and understanding. Madness of the refusal, one of saying everything’s okay, we’re here and that’s enough, we refuse to understand. The madness of passion, the disordered appearance of light upon flesh, delicious-tasting chaos, idiocy feigning affinities. The madness of work and of possession. The madness of going so deep and later turning to look and seeing the world awash in vain slaughter, to be absolutely alone in the depths. Is Amós? From here can I hear him thinking how should I kill myself? or how should I kill in me the various forms of madness and be at the same time tender and lucid, creative and patient, and survive? How can the old love live in me if I understood the instant of Love and now belong to the world of mutes, my fingers wriggling with anxious signals and my throat wide with blanks? How should I kill myself? What sort of signs should Amós transmit before his fingers fall to rest for all eternity? Mute. And man. Lucid and mute. And man. He goes into a bar full of these unsayings, these so called whimsyings, alienations, illnesses, endocrine glands, Amós’s struggle is only that, perhaps the pituitary, you see, perhaps the pituitary isn’t getting on so well. A beer please? Sure, any kind? any kind. A big galoot sidles up: could you get mine, sir, I’m hard up. Yeah, I’ll get it. Six kids and no job. Hard, Amós says, that must be hard. My cock is what’s hard, sir, when I’m in shape, even harder. I bet, says Amós, it must be pretty hard. Real hard is the best way to go, sir, way better than hard up. I get it, says Amós. No, you didn’t get it, says the big galoot, only I get it. Fine, I’m going, says Amós, leaving the money on the counter. Where you think you’re going, dumbass, you afraid you can’t keep up with me? No, it’s not that, I’ve just got to get going. The guy at the counter: that’s enough, Meathead, the guy buys you a beer and you’re getting on his case? Meathead pulls a knife, Amós lifts his arm to protect his face. Asks: why? Meathead takes a second to brandish the knife, takes a few leaps backwards and shouts from the pavement: because it’s harder, dumbass, way harder than hard up, and you there laughing at me the whole time. (And so that was it, I’m still smiling in that way I don’t notice.) The man takes off. It’s over. Are you hurt? No, he didn’t even graze me. Full of crazies around here, man, the world is full of ’em. Yeah, seems so, says Amós. You’re pretty calm, a little pale but calm and in a good mood, you’re always smiling, huh? I’m going. Home.

The doves are sleeping

On the mind’s wake.

Their beaks in tufts of feathers.

Of flesh, keys cadenas

White I persist

In the white doves of piety.

I persist sorrows.

My beak twisted deep down

Into waiting rooms, doves

Of the pulpous forgetting

Of myself: Finite.

My aseptic papers. What beautiful graphic sculpture. What cleanliness. You could lick the page. Likewise with the surface of ice of the Unfounded. Amós goes to the bathroom. His pajamas still light green. From where I watch, Amós looks like just an elegant pair of pajamas. Initials AK, interlaced on the lapel. Confusing as a monogram. So many jagged prongs. Amanda’s idea, most likely. He hesitates on the doorjamb. Locks himself in. An instant of vertigo and he puts his hands on the tiles, leaning his forehead against the chill. He can hear what Amanda says to Míriam, the one he calls hot butt.

Amanda: now he says that he’s only okay in the bathroom, watching the ants.

Míriam: you have ants in the bathroom?

Amanda: those tiny ones. the worst thing is spiders.

Míriam: you have spiders in the bathroom?

Amanda: of course not, Míriam, Amós says there are, that they’re geniuses, brilliant thinkers.

Míriam: you better call the doctor.

Amanda: ants spiders childhood dogs sows and mathematicians. leave him be, in a time of madness, a time of death. Standing, near the sink, in front of the mirror. He unbuttons his pajama shirt. Runs his fingers over his thin chest. It’s hot. A fever, he thinks. And that paradise in his eyes? Paradise? Splendor and emptiness. How did the Unfounded plan my death? Birds and roots. The highest and the deepest. Shall we look for a tree for our wings? For our growth. I remain mute. I read somewhere that they split the vocal cords of guinea pigs. So that you can’t hear the screams. The howls. I remain mute. Throat swollen with screams but I am amputated. The slit ends nevertheless blackened at the tips, sounds softer than pianissimo, fingers over shamrocks, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the sleep of men. Is there a face exactly like mine? A croaking hoarseness, as unable and despairing as mine? Vertiginous-precise landscapes done with a Japanese paintbrush, and in them I listen to the sound of my own crippled gait. I cross the rectangle diagonally. Beside your portrait, Life. The facts. Acts. Sometimes we cling to the stones, other times we merely rest upon them. Some stone or another tumbles down upon our face if we gaze On High. We pass over to the other side. Of the triangle now. It wasn’t the flesh that was harmed, no. Stones and shatterings. The sinuous slowly invading the rigid hypothetical track of equations. An S of sweet seduction. Of Shadow, of Sorbet, of Solution until, a thousand steps later, feet are burned in dunes of sun.