M ICHEL L EIRIS

From the Heart to the Absolute

A slight shock, the birth of a lizard which propagated itself with the noise of torn silk, and I found myself again lying beside a river which washed wood shavings and chips of tanned skin towards the brine of the Arctic seas. In the caves of the earth thieves were heaping their treasures and counterfeiters were heating iron rods to mint coins bearing efgies of the dead. I no longer remembered the nue, nor her deceits; I only remembered a bound, a rapid ascension and that vertiginous Inge fall through the depth of a matrix whose indenitely multiplied meanderings had led me to this place. The landscape around me was desolate: no vegetation, but stone, stone and a few clouds. I noticed far away some abandoned quarries and wagons standing still. All wealth seemed to have crawled into the bowels of the earth, from which burst forth voices, sounds of brawls, and the blow of picks muted by the superimposed layers of stratications which separated the obstinate seekers from the atmosphere. The air was heavy and impassible, not at all troubled by the caress of my lungs and I felt it on me like a glacier without moraines this air which let no trace of its movements be marked by a bird. The silence of the surface was hardly disturbed by a slight, very distant whir, the only perceptible vibration, to which my thought clung as to Ariadnes thread; it was the last organic ligament which held me still suspended above a mineral sleep; and I followed attentively the innitely small variations of the sound engendered by that cord, which was sometimes lower or higher, in accordance with the very feeble modications of the energy which animated it. Yet after a few minutes, it seemed to me that the intensity of the humming sound was increasing, as if the object causing it were coming much nearerand it was not long before I saw a black point emerge beyond the horizona point which soon became a line, and which moved following the direction of the river, a few meters above it, obeying the slightest turn made by the water. It was a bronze arrow which dragged in its wake a long white streamer on which I could read distinctly:

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the catalaunic fields At the same time there approached a line of galleys manned by three ranks of rowers who followed the arrow with sails unfurled, their decks lled with armed warriors wearing shields and helmets. Above their heads the pikes and rigging were crossed, forming a kind of net which bound the sky, while hanging from the masts, as breastplates might hang from the spinal column, the sails showed distinctly the invisible torso of the air. I heard the cries of the maneuvering and noticed soothsayers circulating among the soldiers and explaining to them the predictions they should deduce from the dice game, while disheveled girls ran from one end of the deck to the other, the prettiest of them twirling ames and knives. All the boats were covered with oriammes and statues of gods, and the largest of them carried a vast tent made of steel links, beneath which rested the Emperor, a thin, trembling old man who seemed bored under his purple mantle and at times raised his hand to adjust his crown while a nude young girl was huddled in front of him. He was protected by several rows of lances through which I saw the glitter of his scepter, pointed into the air in order to ward off lightning and other threats. All exigencies come from human blood, the centurions cried; their words punctuated by the toiling ohs of the rowers. An act of force: iron, re, the future will be white with marvels. Mechanically I rose to watch the eet pass by, but I noticed that my clothes were in rags and spattered with clay and seaweed. I ran away and hid behind a rock, and it was there I witnessed the landing of the Roman army and the ight of the barbarians; at that moment the arrow, which had become separated perpendicularly from the river, planted itself right on top of a little hill; the streamer, which was unnaturally long by now, had covered the entire plain and hid in the folds of its nineteen letters the rare accidents of the terrain and the diverse phases of the battle. I saw the Catalaunic Fields stretching before me like a body of water swollen by cataclysms, and the plowed elds sharply determined the trail of the corpses whose ashes were being carried in closed urns to the catacombs. Strange mirage, the U was scooped like an urn; the two Cs, extreme ends of the ploughshare, clove the plain for many ells, unleashing the catapults; and nally the S of treason serpentined with the last barbaric hordes who were vainly attempting a surprise action, before they fell back midst the hooting of panic. When the combat was over, the nineteen letters crumbled together and became incrusted in the ground like memorial inscriptions. Behind the Roman lines, I noticed the Huns in ight, brandishing torches as they ran. Many wagons got stuck in the swamps along the river, whole bands of men were sucked into the earth, and when the extremity of the rebrand they had lifted as high as possible
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had also disappeared, the ame became detached and uttered about in the form of a willo-the-wisp. Millions of res were thus lighted, in the dying day, while the Roman dead began to blanch, in a strange putrefaction that destroyed both bone and muscles, transforming them little by little into glabrous mannikins without sex, their spherical skulls quite nude, and their sleek limbs looking as if they were made of white tights stuffed with horsehair. These bodies were lying around me, before the lances and standards of the Romans, which were carried by motionless soldiers who differed from the dead only in that they were vertical. When night had fallen, the corpses began to rise slowly in ranks of ten to fteen, then started to pursue the will-o-the-wisps, without moving their arms or legs, and oating a few meters above ground. When they had joined the fugitives, their icy breath extinguished all the ames, and soon there were left on the plain only ranks of pikes, the tent of the Emperor still glittering like a coat of mail under the lunar light, and the white mannikins who had stretched out on the memorial letters, blending with them in an identical insensibility of stone, like gravel left there for memorys sake, a short distance from the river, which continued its course towards the North. The nineteen white letters gleamed in the darkness, immovable and as if emerged from the ground, and they seemed to have become its suddenly exteriorized skeleton. Mist rose from the river and poised above the battleeld, becoming more opaque as the night became darker, and forming scrolls as dense as those of the draining smoke arteries. At midnight, the vapors had become massed just above the inscription and wrote in the air 19, which was the number of white letters, set on the blackboard of night, like the rst factor of a prophetic operation the consequences of which would be felt way beyond the sensorial domain, as far as the extreme point of the needle which sews for us the woof of the universe hemmed by our human lives. The wind blew upon the two gures and made them dance one before the other, like a couple in love. The 9, being more sinuous, was the woman, offering her round loop to the 1, which leaped vertically and at times came near in order to thrust its angle into the circle. I observed this trick for the seventh time, when the two gures became denitely fused and disappeared; then there emerged in white against the background of the night: 1 9 10 This sum having been effected in silence, an equilibrium was maintained for an instant. But my ears were suddenly lacerated by a terrible thunderstroke, accompanied by lightning
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of enormous proportions which divided the number 10 and swept the 1 and 9 away, while at the same time it shook the crests on the tops of the helmets, and the pikes became tufted with innumerable sparks. Then the blasted 10 was also smashed, and I saw in its place only the two gures: d and b, the rst green and the second blood red, color of lips and wounds, represented by a halfnude Spanish woman in a scarlet shawl, the design of which underscored the imaginary lozenge which had as summits the stain marking the conuence of her two thighs. Like an object and its image in a mirror, the two ves took their places opposite each other, like eagles on the escutcheon of Charles the Fifth, but the ve which was turned backwards dwindled rapidly and there remained only the red Spanish woman represented by the gure of the senses, of the ngers, and of mating. The dancing woman was irritated, a feeling born more of the storm than the rhythmic measure of the number which had engendered it. She, therefore, rose suddenly to her proper degree, 5 (the number of all the tricks she was capable of ), by drawing from her marvelously ne, smooth black stockings a pair of castanets which she raised as high as her two hands could reach in order to unchain a crackling of gures which soon crossed the rays of the rising sun. Before the soldiers, the dancer with the lozenge then made the ground echo with her heels, her unfurled fan cut the air in ve quarters of numbers and points of departure which showed me once more that total death, like that of gestures, is only a formation of angles and a change in direction. At the same time, the teeth of her steel comb marked, through canalization, the temporal divisions created by the solar rays. Part of the light was reected on the pikes of the legionnaires, and the dancer amused herself by conjugating the movements of her fan and those of her comb in such a way as to increase as much as possible the intensity of the reected light. Finally, as she whirled vertiginously about, transforming the air into a vast and luminous cage which was nothing but interlaced bars, the arms and armor of the warriors grew suddenly incandescent, and the entire Roman army became enamed. The molten metals sank into the crust of the earth, holding in dissolution the esh and bones of the soldiers, whose fossil imprints were found many centuries later on the ingots of a white and unbreakable substance which ignorant scientists called marsite, confounding it with those concretions of the sky that sometimes burrow into the earth, having not fallen from high enough to be able to pierce it from end to end.

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The storm which had upset the gures had by now attained its maximum velocity. I stood trembling behind my senses of living water, watching for the adventure which was coming with a headlong rush. The galleys ed, giving the appearance of a ight of cranes. The sun became a revolver barrel which slowly turned around, presenting at regular intervals a body that lay like an arrow before the orice of the cannon. A shot rang out every minute and the body, its hair streaming ahead, was about to be lost in space. The dancer disappeared at the moment when I was about to seize her, and the entire landscape was swallowed up and replaced by a gleaming maelstrom, with spirals more dense than the wood of a cross. I was hurled into this whirlpool from which there rose from time to time a multicolored bubble that knocked against the zenith, crashed with a great fracas, and returned to the funnel in the form of mirror ashes, pocketknives, and compasses. Along with me there turned around the polished region a dark woman, a male goat, and a bottle containing a few pieces of paper, four crystal dice, and a ball of string all plunged into the brine. Each time my position with reference to the bottle made me see a new side of one of the dice, the woman stretched her nude arms and the goat shook its beard, while a bubble came from the funnel. The woman was the rst to fall into the central pool; I was still far away when I saw her balance herself and disappear with a long cry, like a torch that goes out. The goat followed her almost at once; but he had the luck of nding one of the bubbles, which carried him off rapidly into the air; up there he became changed into a cloud which allowed him to come down without painin the form of a ne rain. As for myself, I succeeded, just as my circular voyage was about to lead me to the edge of the abyss, in clutching the bottle and, moving it violently, I threw the number 12 with the dice, which assured me the protection of the zodiac. I found, in fact, within reach of my hand, an aerial girdle decorated with the twelve signs. It placed itself without aid around my loins, and drew me away from the whirlpool, carrying me outside of the zone of terrestrial attraction. When I came back to this planet, it was on a beautiful summer night, I was metamorphosed into a thunder stone and on my face were engraved these words, which summarized everything the gure 5 and the oriamme of The Catalaunic Fields had taught me: Needle A stippled curve here is the thread of thought Feast of passing the Equator and the Camp of the Golden Sheet here is where the saddle wounds the circumvolutions in prismatic darkness.
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