In the first of my formative years in Vienna, Wolfgang was tormentingly superior to me (but never took advantage of it), but I soon caught up with him. By fourteen or fifteen (disgusting: the masculine trail of pubic hair running to the navel, on boyish skin), I beat the hell out of him. I wasn’t stronger but was tough as a whip and full of evil tricks—After all, I had the more beautiful mother (and the evil bewitchment of my foster mother Aunt Selma in my eyes . . .). By the way, there was nothing nixie-like about Aunt Selma in my dream: she was smiling: ce si joli sourire de toute jeune fille qui était vraiment elle.

Both are now dead, mother and foster mother. Sur le chemin de la mort, ma mère rencontra une grande banquise . . . Cousin Wolfgang too is dead; Schwab too is dead; Stella is dead—elle nous regarda, mon frère et moi, et puis elle pleura. And in my dream, she had her pretty smile: un si joli sourire, presque espiègle (a pretty word: it comes from Till Eulenspiegel). Ensuite elle fut prise dans l’opaque.

The girl from last night—she too came out of the fog. I recited poetry to her too—songs of life:

Mon enfant, ma soeur,

songe à la douceur

d’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!

Aimer à loisir

aimer et mourir

au pays qui te ressemble—

Ice-dancer language. Gaia on the telephone: swaying cadences—stop (to listen)—start again—then released: the swing of a wide arc—leap—pirouette—she stands still again: the next arc already tensing in her. . .

I love listening to her: with no one else does French sound so melodious, so artificial . . . I wait for the glass-bead tricklings of the next few sentences, look at her mouth: scarlet (gueule), behind it the predatory teeth of her black father (his lips like stamp pads) . . .

(Gaia’s description: The Moor father of the Moor father arrives to extract his son from the affair; her mother, the Princess Jahovary, relates: “I saw him out the window from above as he was getting out of the car: cute—a short black Moor with his hair gone completely white . . .” Gaia’s granddad: a negative.)

Gaia too is dead. I am surrounded by dead people. Barely forty-nine years old and already in the best society:

silently over Golgotha, God’s golden eyes open . . .

I feel it, it’s going to be a good day. I could not wish for a better day for my protracted vice, my passion for constructing sentences whose rhythmic tensions and solutions release the Eros of language:

in the mysterious appeal and attraction that the Word achieves in its wizard-like combination with other words: so that not only does it pass itself along to the next word and the one after that, as in the Archimedean whorl, by way of transmitting a specific and intended meaning (so as to make a series of linked signals produce an image with which experience is transmitted, as a sign whose transcendent shadow, shifting like that of a sundial, forces the other signs grouped around it to yield the secrets enclosed within them) but also (beyond language) a kind of whispering begins, an echoing in the spaces around the words, spaces that would have remained closed without the overtones of the multivalence of each word, spaces that now expand like the expiring sound waves of a tolling bell, followed and driven on by further tolling: each stroke of the bell is the assault of a primordial signal on the vessel of our soul . . .