There’s a secret sickness called Lisa. Like all sicknesses it’s miserable and it comes on at night. In the weave of a mysterious language whose words signify without exception that the foreigner “isn’t well.” And somehow I would like her to know that the foreigner is “having a hard time,” “in strange lands,” “without much chance of writing epic poetry,” “without much chance of anything.” The sickness takes me to strange and frozen bathrooms where the plumbing works according to an unexpected mechanism. Bathrooms, dreams, long hair flying out the window to the sea. The sickness is a wake. (The author appears shirtless, in black glasses, posing with a dog and a backpack in the summer somewhere.) “The summer somewhere,” sentences lacking in tranquillity, though the image they refract is motionless, like a coffin in the lens of a still camera. The writer is a dirty man, with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his short hair wet with sweat, hauling barrels of garbage. He’s also a waiter who watches himself filming as he walks along a deserted beach, on his way back to the hotel . . . “The wind whips grains of sand” . . . “Without much chance” . . . The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer’s jacket is also black.
Roberto Bolano, from Antwerp
5 comments:
Beautifully written - great imagery.
kubla, this reads, in sentiment, more than style, like the predicament of the sebaldian narrator: the malaise, displacement, alienation, sense of being "foreign". i must read some Bolano. Bought 2066!Thx for reading my blog. Steve("Decayetude/TowardsUtopia")
It is sentimental. A sense of emotional attachment prevails in the poem. The contents binds you to the concept.
Found your blog through your old email id...that's the I'd I remember. I know many of the writings here, so I am sure it is you. Please do contact if you read this message. It is important.
Bidisha
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