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Bypassing Rue Descartes
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BYPASSING rue Descartes
I descended toward the Seine, shy, a traveler,
A young barbarian just come to the capital of the world. |
Rue Descartes: a street in
Quartier Latin, the university/intellectual/artistic district of Paris.
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We were many, from Jassy and Koloshvar, Wilno
and Bucharest, Saigon and Marrakesh,
Ashamed to remember the customs of our homes,
About which nobody here should ever be told:
The clapping for servants, barefooted girls hurry in,
Dividing food with incantations,
Choral prayers recited by master and household together. |
Jassy (present-day
Moldova), Koloshvar (Hungary), Wilno (Lithuania), Bucharest
(Romania), Saigon (Vietnam) and Marrakesh (Morocco)
are all cultural centres considered, or considering themselves, to be outside the sphere
of European, or Western, or universalist, literature.
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| I had left the cloudy provinces behind, I
entered the universal, dazzled and desiring. |
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Soon enough, many from Jassy and Koloshvar, or
Saigon or Marrakesh
Would be killed because they wanted to abolish the customs of their homes . Soon
enough, their peers were seizing power
In order to kill in the name of the universal, beautiful ideas. |
A reference to wars and revolutions in
Eastern Europe and Asia.
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Meanwhile the city behaved in accordance with
its nature,
Rustling with throaty laughter in the dark,
Baking long breads and pouring wine into clay pitchers,
Buying fish, lemons, and garlic at street markets,
Indifferent as it was to honor and shame and greatness and glory,
Because that had been done already and had transformed itself
Into monuments representing nobody knows whom,
Into arias hardly audible and into turns of speech. |
In contrast, Western culture seems to
concentrate on its wealth, ignoring the great (but also destructive) ideas still alive in
the provinces.
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Again I lean on the rough granite of the
embankment,
As if I had returned from travels through the underworlds
And suddenly saw in the light the reeling wheel of the seasons
Where empires have fallen and those once living are now dead. There is no capital of
the world, neither here nor anywhere else,
And the abolished customs are restored to their small fame
And now I know that the time of human generations is not like the time of the earth.
As to my heavy sins, I remember one most vividly:
How, one day, walking on a forest path along a stream,
I pushed a rock down onto a water snake coiled in the grass.
And what I have met with in life was the just punishment
Which reaches, sooner or later, the breaker of a taboo.
Berkeley, 1980 |
C.f. "He who was living is now
dead." In T.S.
Eliot's Waste Land, Western decadence is presented in a series of literary
images.
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