of the right types of nascence (prose)

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Der blaue Berg (1910) by Lesser Ury

(transcribed)

He approached Sabros and felt an inexplicably nervous density. It was sadness, he was sure of it, but not any sadness. This sadness, such is the nature of its absolute absence, cannot chill nor hold by virtue of its forms, and one feels instead in some aeropause by it created, like orbiting a body of subtle force but oppressive mass. The only manner in which to live despite the divinity of this sadness was to deposit it in some voiceless space, such as a fir caddy or a glove compartment, and always walk, breathe or eat or do any matters of life not ten metres from it.  

His former home was the basin for the most asperous dreams. The blue and teal enamel of the flowerpots was itself spiny-skinned was he to think of them, and in a sense, his certainty that such sensation was to be produced from his touch was enough to echo some domestic disgust within him; but seldom logical are the thoughts of home, and how scrambled they become, palely scattered and labyrinthine and exhibitive of the most retorted expressions. The entrance has this mandarine tree which his father had planted somewhen; and it never bore fruit, no matter the richness of her green nor the cast of her health. His father said — he was reminded — that it had to do with her being planted after the first light of June, «an inch too late», he said, or perhaps «seeded an inch too deep», or the sun, an «inch too angled», and this was the particular aperture for the world and its numinous aspects of error. The tree, now, with her inhuman halo, bore torrents of mandarines every year since father died, insofar as the ground of her shadow is a russet membrane of rot, but heavenly rot, celestial rot. He thought at first that it could be confouded with something primordial and living, as if himself, his bones, his thoughts, his memories, and perhaps all bones and thoughts and memories were at one point spoil from a series of springs vengeful of that inch-borne error. It will not be possible for him to look at himself again after the mandarine tree, as he has been transfigured completely in that poem which was the mandarine tree. He was now in her and he was simultaneously an ear in search of winter. All of the times in which he moved were fabrications in swift dissolution. He could not be moved; but his rot was not heavenly; rather radical and repugnant.

Most magnetic was the flower. Neither him nor I know which flower it is, nor are we in any way able to describe it. He doesn’t quite remember it, but it is not forgotten. I hold no memories of the flower, but I understand the flower, because the flower isn’t and I am not. Her petals waft but their substance is so overcome with barbarous beauty that they are at once insulting and impossible in their magnitude of perfection, but in this description I acquiesce my understanding of the flower: now she is and I am. He assumes that the flower is and isn’t concomitantly, perhaps atrociously. It is a bellicose silence too big and spaced and sad to be entirely present at any given moment. Thinking himself made of something else, he fails to truly see the beingness and unbeingness of the flower. He accepts it. He does not enter the house. He leaves. 

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Nikodem L.