Text as Participation

     The absence of talent has prompted me to autothematisme: what is a poetic text?
     -- So that I’d have some text to publish in Dzejas diena I decide: I will dream it and then decide if a dream is an art form or a lifestyle. I met a young, musically gifted and very pious Slovak girl, we walked through slender aisles, on tender walkways and began to kiss. That, of course, is text – but it was true, I swear! She made me listen to some Tatra women sing inside the chapel – me who cannot hold a single note! but so it was. “So God exists? – I ask; I know that even to ask that question is to lie. She replies: “Ako áno, ako nie – who Else could have made me for you for this here existence?” Nude in the consistory (?!), the two of us perched on a long table, legs dangling, a nun walks in, starts mopping up – not giving us a second thought. The joy of being, so innocent, so bright (you know, without a struggle, without sin’s pathos – have done no brighter texting since so long ago in high school), later on she points at squatting vinyards: “See, we’ve waited not in vain! The pontiff’s here!” Indeed, I see them halt before the chapel – but what a crowd! That bent body, the familiar, weary gait, the light purple miter. More and more people – and look, there’s Golem by the roadside, the muddy flab aquiver, alien bones protruding: could that be Ýmir from whom the world was once created or just a saintly fool to drag along the burden of all flesh? Giants stagger through the foliage, the Rephaim on short and gimpy legs, the dreadful mutants that tail the Pope, those horrid gray-haired wives in carts, clutching skinless sides, they’ve been created too? They too presented with immortal souls? For us – so we’d not forget? Or we – for them? – She of the light mind says: “In this existence, He presents them so you’d know: He has it all. To Him, all is quite as real as what the two of you create: your vanity and Tatra songs, your lusting after me, your wish to serve, so picturesque in pontiff’s image, my blond hair, fair skin, our sweet depravity. No, look, see the Repahim, those formless, giant cripples? They’ll also drag along, He’s given you this being so for a spell you’d get a sense of the dimensions, rozumieš!”
     I lust for her. I want Him to create her for me once again but fear the dark. I fear the darkened room, I fear the coming night.


2000
Translated by Ieva Lesinska