of an eagle bone

marked out a year of moons.

Described by scholars as

“decorative” or “insignificant”:

it was the first book.

Not so much faber as

sky watcher, casually

he blew into the whistle.

II

The first woman’s face

is five centimeters high.

Delicate hair

rises from a slightly

rounded forehead.

Age has not blurred

her oblique and pensive gaze.

Carved in mammoth ivory

she was abandoned

at Dolní Věstonice.

III

In the cave at Sterkfontein (Transvaal),

on the appearance of the first men

recognized as men by science,

they settled in the same chamber

where their ancestors

had been devoured in turn

by hyenas and big cats,

its earlier inhabitants.

The Demon of Repetition

The repetition that rages in history presupposes a whole history of repetition. The more we go back in time, the more repetition is cloaked in majesty. The rarer written traces become, the more impressive is the role that repetition plays in them. It seems that signs are marked out most of all to indicate how something has to be repeated. Etiquette is the first literary genre. For something to make sense, it has to be repeated—and in repeating one thing, everything needs to be repeated. During the consecration of a king, but also during a hunting expedition, history has to be recapitulated from its origins, so that from it sprouts the tiny bud that is the new action, protected and sustained by all previous actions, the latest stitch at the center of the immense fabric. Passing down through time’s race toward us, the powers of repetition are gradually canceled out: like the goddess in the Underworld, where the Invisible Hand snatches a cloak and a diadem from her at every threshold. What appears in the end is not stark nakedness, but an empty frame, an animal legacy that cold-mindedness would like to wash away. Paul Valéry—the genuine New Man of the kind that became chemically distilled in the solitude of the algebraic Ego—looks upon that empty frame as the most tedious scourge: he calls it “cyclosis,” “the cyclomania of our essence.”³⁵² And so he writes: “I was born, at the age of twenty, exasperated by repetition—that is to say, against life. Getting up, getting dressed, eating, evacuating, going to bed—and always these seasons, these stars—And history!

“I know everything by heart——

“to the point of madness … This table has repeated itself before my eyes for 39 years!—This is why I cannot bear the countryside, working the land, the furrows, waiting for the harvests—All this is regarded as ‘poetic.’

“But for me poetic is the opposite of this sad industry, mortally circular like the daytime rotation and the other——.”³⁵³