Alexis Leger / Saint-John Perse
1887-1975 / 1911-
Dear to me are the signal-readers who go before us like a party of Blackfeet, returning with their measure of what lies ahead.
The people are peaceful here … We can sleep beneath these walls
… Best to keep moving, to give those oases-lights a wide berth …
The others look on me as though I were an owl, chasing the twilight. And it is the ones whose love I hunger for the most who whisper the loudest that we’ll never arrive. The simpler the mission the more the air is fructified with secrecy. Knowing this, I must have parted ways with wisdom at the first unrolling of the maps, the setting out of thread and pin.
I could have sent another man, and it would not have been difficult finding one willing to go, there are so many now who have grown up with the knowledge that blue and gold are not the colors of the end but merely the end of what we know, the beginning of what we lack and what we desire. They would have left behind the soft voices and the unblemished nights with every gesture appropriate to sorrow, would have paced out their first hours like a funeral cortege, but by breakfast their laughter would have that skirling dissonant ring, of men too drunk to be afraid and eager to run headlong past the horizon.
I daydream constantly what could have been but since no one dares contradict me outright, I live within my own fable of certainty.
Pity walks across the fields or hides in the hollows of trees.
The raincloud low to the south has watered the ghost gardens of Babylon.
I play this in the minds of my companions until one of them says it out loud, like a brute in a trance made suddenly dreamy and girlish. The others stare at him, aghast. At this stage they’ll settle for visions but what drives them is a purity that only the material world can satisfy. Would I harm them with some daily confidence? Would disappointment feel robbed if I were to tell them their fears are justified? You build or you break and it’s presumptuous to think one can know the difference.
The signal-readers wait on a low ridge, just now within shouting distance. I’ll overrule them at the next full moon. And we will see what we were meant to see.