Reflections go with the dying sun
If hell is other people, so is heaven
Reflections go with the dying sun. He is leaving us, for now, with feelings so large as to swallow the sky. And so he does. As for us, we move quickly along the sidewalks, in the shadows, in the lights of the city street and the passing cars, the screeching trains and pounding feet, hips that roll through the night. Oh, does he see that we glow on the glimmer he gives? What Nature reveals of the arithmetic of beauty, we put into practice across the whole of the earth. In accordance with the iron laws of living, we ourselves produce and reproduce — urgently, devotedly — with the foresight that at any moment it explodes. We go so far as to encourage it, and even work with the utmost diligence to bring it about, exhausted and delighted with the fantasy of ending it all. Of course, even in dreams, when just this naught seems to be won, the whole horror resurrects and the effacement must begin again with renewed strength of useless frustration.
Such is the constancy of the human heart: that what our suffering sets out to destroy, a painful longing begs us to preserve and reconstruct. Thus the night shines from a departed sun, and everything we thought best to leave behind returns to us once more, appearing in a new disguise with the ever more perplexing slow rotation of the earth. Figures floating in the ancient ether — masks with gaping eyes and open mouths, abysmal holes from which the cosmos flow interminably — therefore once visited Picasso when all of life was in need of a fresh face for the fresh features of modern fright. Or this evening, for example, which harkens longingly to Raphael and the bright and gentle color of his rosy sky: the open field of childhood dreams, before the world had caused their ruin. With the fall of dusk, even the plants along the street seem to show traces of a universal hysteria: the helpless entanglement of leaves and gnarling branches that silently carry the last signs of the holy rapture that was once expected to deliver us. At last, only a few rays of long and distant light still manage to pass through the dark mourning veil of night, and as these flashes give themselves to us a final time — final sparking farewell — I close the door and go inside; the stars that take my place will burn on brightly to their end.
As for myself, I spend the night moving from room to room in my apartment. There is, first of all, the one in which I sleep, where the clothes gather in corners, and pile one on top of one another like turned-over remains. A leg of mine from yesterday is crumpled by the door, and the stark white shirt from nights ago lies beneath the bed. Other formations consist of rags and many small bits of fabric. Between the closet and the window, I watch as I bend and fold from the waist to my knees, stretching both of my arms beyond my head and upwards to the stars. In the other rooms there is the couch near the books, then the kitchen and table, and the toilet, finally the studio — where I sit to look out onto the window. //
Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937. Museo Reina Sofia.
Raphael, The Transfiguration, 1516 - 1520. Musei Vaticani.
Rembrandt, Student at a Table by Candlelight, ca. 1642. Metropolitan Museum.