Opening up—: Paris, Vesak 1964
- Opening up—Paris, Vesak 1964
Everything can finally come to rest in a vortex of silence. The day's sounds fade. Late sunlight shines against the windowpane and through it into the room where dust motes move in the golden well like dancers in the limelight. A wind rustles the sheets of typed paper. Now you can relax in the cockpit of the chair. You send your mind's eye with a kite high above the city. So that the mooned orb may scan the horizons. How far the purple vineyards and the whipped coasts of my country? Are the outlines of hills not the Pure Body of Buddha? Probably not. Or they may as well be those of John Smith.
I whack my eyes to the mountains. Let them go scavenge and then carry back the tattered scene to the nest of my innards. Slit open the secret stomach. Nothing belongs to you until you have eaten it. Here then the contents of my belly. Here they are lined up now, each with a name, I count the heads two by two. They come from afar, from beyond blue mountains. What news do you bring from home, Tokoloshe?
We are here to wear out death. It's the month of May, coagulated blood of trees swells out in flat leaves becoming greener. A dog gallops across the road. In the park dusk is rising from below along the trunks. The wind falls silent but flowers still fall; a bird sings and the mountain holds even more mystery. Tonight, when the moon is full, Gautama will die again, once more be born, again scrape the soft snail flesh from the shell of the unconscious, will die all over. This night Buddha entered Nirvana; it was like wood being consumed entirely.
My wife just recently had her birthday and she still doesn't understand any Afrikaans. Recently a friend sat weeping in his bed for three days with no reason until his eyes in their sockets were like house fish in their glass bowls.
I'm just a spy, sent out each day on reconnaissance, disguised in hat and pipe and ideas and reason and skin.
But I hope in this way to build a watertight case against life. So that there may later be an end.
Therefore, to add to the foot is an annex to flesh; to append to the hand is to plant a senseless finger there.
Light petals fall everywhere with loud cracks. Cry like the violin. Cry, cry, cry, cry. [End Page 164]
Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and visual artist, and a well-known human rights activist. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to Paris in the late 1960s and became deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Breytenbach's works include A Season in Paradise (1980), Mouroir (1983), Notes from the Middle World (2009), All One Horse (1989), The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (1996), Dog Heart (1998), and Voice Over: A Nomadic Conversation with Mahmoud Darwish (Archipelago Books, 2009). His many honors include the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and Die Windvanger in 2008.
