GÖRAN SONNEVI
FROM "MOZART'S THIRD BRAIN"
LXIV
another bird, that flew upward, in the Forum Romanum
up toward the Rostra Maybe a serin, but
I don't know Flowers were in bloom, flowers I don't recognize
What may have been acanthus, growing like lupins
And a red flower, close to the ground White butterflies
At the house of the Vestals roses bloomed Up above
the palace and the ruins of villas a falcon flew
Sudden silence of birds At what sort of rostrum do what sorts
of speakers appear I listen to the voices of Europe
I feel no confidence; not even in my own distrust
STEER! We all carry the sparkling diamond oar
Hard; like the gates of Hades Shadows full of unrest
The Curia, restored in the '30s, in the face of new imperial power
Which senate meets there; which tribunes of the people, if they would now
have audience, even in Hades We move through the centuries
Faced with destitution's images The blood of the martyrs is clasped, cradled
As if Agave were clutching the head of Pentheus; the blood runs
down into a bowl; a grail The Etruscan votive sculptures
are thin as sticks; are by Giacometti What do the dead
see? What do they see that even the dying do not see? What
Hesperian fruits, shining Pomegranates; golden fruits?
By the Baths of Diocletian are orange trees Hidden
inside there, Michelangelo's basilica, is full
of power, stone-dead, of the living Small flames burn for believers
Policemen stand in groups, some with bulletproof vests, submachine guns
The door to a bordello stands open Private health clubs
with sauna, massage At Stazione Termini are all kinds of people;
from all over the planet Everything stands wide open, glowing poverty
A beggar woman, emaciated, a shawl over her head, a half-
grown child in her arms, also sleeping, does not wake when you give
her money Which ones listen Which hear the invisible voice The one
with no platform, no altar, who is not even heard at the sacrificial spring in the under-
world, welling up from the rock; clear green water You want
to touch the water, but I stop you Maybe it is also
polluted? We go to the Colosseum, sit there together
on a marble bench, the fragment of one, behold the endless stream
of tourists Shadows in the planetary Hades; we among them
On the Palatine there's a wedding; we talk to the cats a while Look at
more flowers, butterflies One wholly ordinary sparrow, but a little different
In our hotel room afterwards we make love; fiercely, with great intensity
LXXX
Dance is born out of the deepest interior of our bodies As if the light there
were streaming out, out of each body part's smallest movement
We hear gasping breaths We behold mouths open in trance
Out of them light also issues, in the whirling darkness
The stone falls through millennia The clear water's darkness
deeper and deeper But the vanishing is only apparent The
construction of enormity grows and grows In its transparency
Pain's nadir, deeper and deeper At its zenith
Identification with pain, annihilation of pain, is impossible
And yet it's there Like the entrance into darkness
May I touch your darkness? I would so like to
Forms of power move in the invisible Even
the anti-empire has power, I understand Together
we have the power to sublate power, I im-
agined once Even if only within ourselves
But there is no way to place oneself outside Night has no limit
It is toward infinity I want to go Unimaginably
What takes place in this thinking substance? The play of the mind's
faculties, the dance, across the inner, shimmering surfaces
For me there was no limit For me there is no
limit, except at the instant of snapping, even were it
endlessly stretched We will meet in the silence, after the dance
What does the voice communicate? As if I never knew
in advance It comes with all its potentials
Invisible Out of its fold, foldings, a face peers
as if it were Harlequin-Mozart The great darkness of the eyes! Also
their smile Quick, friendly We can be like that too
My vision is now given to the Eye-Brain Yours, you who
look at me, out of your femininity, half turned away, almost with
your back to me So that we will not burn up? I hear
your voice It exists in the vast play of the voices, their light
What kind of movement up from death? Is such a thing possible at all?
A flame rises from the ashes, dances, offers itself, its body
in its moments of stillness, a prayer Coiling into itself
Unwinding again Returning to the ruins of silence
LXXXII
How to reach into your innermost fragility? Screens drop down very
quickly Inside there is a glimpse of a swallow's
wing
I follow the eye of pain, straight into pain's crystal
I shall approach the colorlessness of nothing, its color
I shall do so with joy, as if approaching
your face I saw you move, saw the grace of your body
You're illuminated from within The movements of your
limbs
You're about to explain something that deeply moves you, that makes
use
of your love
I look at you from the far side of everything Even
from there
I
can walk
What is it that shall break through the first integration?
The face has no end We move toward the face of infinity
The face bears its deep transparency, its pulsating resistance,
until we both come, arriving in a single cry. . .
LXXXVII
Your wing, that carries me
My wing, that would carry you
CVIII
I hear my father saying: Are you stark-raving mad? The rapidly outdated
language moves like snowflakes through my memory The dead do not rest
They walk through the world, we don't need to call to them They are
their own interpretation They, too, exist in what's foreign We are parts of language
We cannot take anything back Can we stop short of the abyss?
We fall deeper and deeper, glass-clear, as if in justice to clarity
But nothing is clear Intuitions come hovering, scarcely distinguishable
forms in nothing, like ice-profiles in water, the dragonfly's vanishing
pairs of wings The small mountain ashes' new leaf bouquets emerge, into nothing
Becoming in annihilation A slightly varied formulation
of Hölderlin's thought Disappearing far out on one of
the tangents of glass While the hypersphere grows and grows
I hear impersonal music, no human's music
Again I'm very scared What do I dare? What don't I?
What kinds of becoming The existing annihilations rampage all around us
In which do we take part Breaking out into total answerability
But I don't accept this I pluck off the red beetles
that are chewing up the fritillarias One of the cowslips in the grass
has red flowers You say it was there last year as well We
see society move, just under the skin The enormous forces
In growing industrial amplifications Resonances Shaking
the ground, the hills, all the bridges, all the connecting strings Wave connections
All projectiles moving toward the transparency of the luminous skull. . .
The personal brain The one that grows through human interaction,
and through the interaction of humans with all other beings and entities
Growing, beyond time, like mountain ridges Which are completely contingent
Poverty's brain The one that never got to grow out
to its full potential Or one that was damaged in
some other way How the brain is in its completeness, its full worth
Even the angelic hierarchies are equalized, as in a mystical blossoming
CXIII
The delicate light of the night-scented orchids on the heath, late evening
sun
We walk in their scent We drop to our knees to inhale
the musk orchid, its special fragrance It smells
like honey,
you say You prick your hand on a dwarf thistle No,
I
say, it smells different, a bit strange We are not
strangers here
Under the wall's whitewash is putrefaction's image A
mother
We are informed by the absence of knowledge Does
a third form exist?
Mozart's
final hour,
the instruments are smashed, in some preformative statements Word
propositions, below shrilling flutes, the larger stringed instrument's
multitude of voices And the Muse for me invents,
for me in her
presence, with a new shimmering, a turn for the dance of my foot. . .
What kind of society is coming? And to which society
are we the increment?
I look at the swallows and the swifts, their different geometries. . .
I look at the wild roses in their different colors, pure white to
pink, the new flowers of the pink ones have a tinge of yellow
I brought you one of them The bird in the thicket
cried warning On the road
I ran over a viper, which we looked at later, it was beautiful
In each person a society is built Different societies,
their points of conflict,
areas of confrontation This is Kypris's tract No
one else has rights here
No one has the right to usurp the rights of others This
defines society
XC
Even the empire crushed from within gathers its shards again
Chechnya Burned-out tanks on the streets of the capital
still smoldering, soldiers in motion People, on their
way in the rain
From the empire's invisible center new signals go out
Making themselves heard in Bosnia as well On the
surface bordering on
the
other empire Also in
its
fragmented organization. . .
Even this country, Sweden, is now a part of the empire
Now we also become a part of the empire's collective power
I myself want to be outside the boundary
Freedom's extremity is tested by what is not yet defined
I lived in the underworld of catastrophes Beside
the concrete garage in Hades
We have only the human lives we have They are all
compounded
I will fight for every shard of democracy
As if no resignation existed, no emptiness
You asked: how was it there, was it very run down No,
I answered, it was rather tidy, a neighborhood typical
of social group 3 Then it struck me that the concept
of the social group
has almost entirely disappeared from the language, following the concept
of class
That this has now disappeared in silence The actual
grows in silence
This class struggle still exists In the battle between
invisible classes
The intensity of murder changes We see the shadows
Hear the cries As if the intensity of tremendousness
also grew
in darkness Naked existence Although
it cannot exist. . .
Parts of the world's violence? Yes, there's no escaping this
Neither abdicating nor usurping power helps
Weapons are everywhere Angels fly everywhere
We cut into one another's transparent bodies
Automatic weapons automatically release The blood
is transparent
How shall I seek transnational form Who are my allies?
XCI
The sum of all blindings How do I gain entry? How do I
we get through? As if there were but one blinding-brain How do I touch
its leaves, its butterfly forms It is night Only then is light visible
For whom do the blinding stars appear? The stars of darkness –
In darkness it will come In the lucent darkness
How can I know? I cannot know That's what darkness
is
Only there are we alive Only there does new light become alive
as if it came from voice, from living voice, water. . .
But the burning brain is in all human beings It sets the house ablaze
Those still alive are already shadows Enclosed in fire
XCII
A society rushing away from equality And which has
chosen
this path; also away from democracy Already subjected
to the democratic deficit of its central structures,
to the Secret Committees of the elites, locally, centrally. . .
How to emerge from my obsessions? The caesura
of sex opens in my brain That's where I want to be,
kissing its
lips Smelling its fragrance, tasting it The
faint, bitter taste
amidst its sweetness I seek your sleep that I may
awaken
What am I to do with the sexual empire? It has its
power; we are in its force field But we are not vassals
ANAX ANASSA If not, then never mind Kitharodoi;
if only with
the instruments of our bodies; the souls of our bodies
For we are in this game, this game of chance Beyond
death
My voice is no longer equal This is the meaning of
vassalage
Do I accept this No Every
day value is re-created Until it
is no longer possible We are in this order Order
there is none
XCIII
Which is the symbolic form that's approaching In
an impossible
topology All faces touch one another With
their
light, or their darkness This is what we must understand
Farthest down in darkness I touch the skin of light, touch its
splintering stars All the signs look at us Their
sound
The time of stars is part of the time of our bodies Enters
into new form
We are in the air of the indefinite That's where
new laws are born
We shall violate them as well Until we ourselves
are destroyed
And if we cannot be renormalized If we actually are
in real infinity Where literally nothing
can be strange, not even the music of nothing. . .
And so I take a deep breath, breathe in all that is strange. . .
Where we'll meet one another without fear, in that house
Even at light's lowest level there's splendor, the invisible rose-form
of the brain, in its flowing geometry, whirling We
are
literally measurements of earth In its unheard-of
pulverization Invisible dust New
forms of time,
giving birth, in those successively born, in the mother row –
Today, on this day, at this hour Kerylos and Alkyon fly. . .
The white, invisible storm, also has an eye
The delicate branches of the trees move in the gray wind The
brain's
tree moves Or takes some other form We
are informed
by the real; what can break through the transfigurations of the lie
Technologies of the lie keep being developed Virtual
history,
what has never existed, becomes in the next moment real
The lie steps in and shapes the real In an indissoluble
confusion, lethal The mountains, the maxima, in this
always growing
complexity.
. .
How do we cross over, with which wings The wing
of truth, sharp;
flies
with its darkness
The wing of love flies too; but it is never alone How
will
you meet me?
Even abstract wings fly; slice us up with their light
XCIV
Infinity is liberation, or else it is nothing Wouldn't
we then
be slaves to infinity, subjected to freedom's constraint?
Already the intensity of light is plainly increasing; even if amplified
by snowy surfaces
over the landscape of light's lowest level The lowest
souls are those of the tyrants,
Plato says; but I wonder about the hierarchies, if time's interlacing
is different, non-hierarchical Angry cats get no
sleep, you tell me
Then in the night we make love, shower together
I will go into the mountain of time, into its resonant, inner matter
It is not the light-sphere, which also resounds faintly Signs
of fire
shine
on the forehead
I touch the skin of night I touch the resounding
darkness
The impossible is completely abstract Its love
But in the darkness your hands come to my face before you leave
Historical movements are not what we believe them to be
Then what are they? Movements within the larger brain?
No! I've said that the Great Man does not exist
Afterward I am inside the Empire In its stasis The
dark eyes look at me
But I do not accept the empire I accept no kingdom,
neither
on heaven nor on earth,
nor
any other place;
the thin flakes of birch-bark stir in the gray wind, invisibly We
are
the
movements of history
The one thing that cannot change is zero Infinity
is not stasis, rather the complete change of the all, all the time
Equally awful, equally unendurable, without love
Translated
from the Swedish by Rika Lesser.
NOTES:
XC: social group: a group of persons who form a relatively homogeneous unit in social status. The term socialgrupp more or less replaced socialklass as a concept during the heyday of the welfare state. There were three numbered social groups, roughly corresponding to the upper, middle, and lower classes.
XCII: ANAX, ANASSA: Greek, ruler or sovereign; master, mistress, respectively.
kitharodoi: plural of Greek kitharodos, one who sings to the kithara (Latin/English: cithara), an ancient Greek stringed instrument of the lyre class, having a wooden case.