a boy threw up on this day

6934

          Mainly, I am sleepy. Not the kind of sleepiness that carries within it, like all sleepiness, even the morbid kind, the physical privilege of rest. Not a sleepiness that, because it is going to forget life and perhaps bring dreams, carries on the tray with which it comes to our souls the placid offerings of a grand abdication. No: this is a sleepiness that doesn't get to sleep, that weighs on the eyelids without closing them, that gathers in a gesture one feels to be stupid and repels the felt corners of incredulous lips. This is a sleepiness like that which weighs uselessly /on/ the body in the great insomnias of the soul.
          Only when night comes do I in some way feel not a joy but a repose that, because other reposes are happy, feels happy by the analogy of the senses. Then the sleepiness passes, the confusion of the mental half-light, which that sleep produces, fades, becomes clear, almost becomes illuminated. The hope of other things comes for a moment. But that hope is short. What survives is a tedium without sleepiness or hope, the bad awakening of one who never managed to fall asleep. And from the window of my room I spy, poor soul tired of its body, many stars; many stars, nothing, oh nothing, but many stars...

(Bernardo)

to the bare spring the triggers an animal not

1831

For a long time, I haven't written. Months have passed without my being alive, and I continue to endure, between the office and physiology, in an intimate stagnation of thinking and feeling. This, unhappily, does not rest: in rot there is fermentation.
. . .
For a long time, I haven't existed. I am extremely calm. No one can distinguish me from who I am. I felt myself breathe just now as if I'd done something new, something late in coming to me. I begin to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and again take up the course of my existence. I don't know if by doing so I will be happier or sadder. I know nothing.

(Bernardo)

plebeian spice

today a small bit of broken ground
still a tangent of everything else