Errant

"Non, il pense qu'en vérité il a toujours habité dans cette
ville-là, qu'il y est né et qu'il y a été élevé.
Quoi d'étonnant si l'esprit ne se souvient pas de ses anciennes
demeures, qu'il habita et où il naquit jadis,
Puisque ce monde, à l'instar du sommeil, le recouvre, comme
les nuages qui recouvrent les étoiles;
D'autant qu'il a parcouru tant de cités et que la poussière
n'a pas été encore balayée de sa faculté de perception
Et qu'il n'a pas fait non plus d'ardents efforts pour que son
cœur devienne pur et contemple le passé,
De telle sorte que son cœur puisse jeter un coup d'œil par
l'ouverture de ce mystère et puisse voir ouvertement le
commencement et la fin."

(جلال الدین محمد بلخى, extrait // excerpt, مثنوی معنوی, trad. inconnue // unknown transl.)

Wall

I was sayin' let me outta here before I was even born,
It's such a gamble when you get a face,
It's fascinatin' to observe what the mirror does,
But when I dine it's for the wall that I set a place.

I belong to the blank generation,
And I can take it or leave it each time.
I belong to the ____ generation,
But I can take it or leave it each time.

(Richard Hell/Television, extrait // excerpt, Blank Generation)

Pain

He entered, but he entered full of wrath;
His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels,
And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire,
That scared away the meek ethereal Hours
And made their dove-wings tremble. On he flared,
From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault,
Through bowers of fragrant and enwreathèd light,
And diamond-pavèd lustrous long arcades,
Until he reached the great main cupola.
There standing fierce beneath, he stamped his foot,
And from the basement deep to the high towers
Jarred his own golden region; and before
The quavering thunder thereupon has ceased,
His voice leapt out, despite of god-like curb,
To this result: "O dreams of day and night!
O monstrous forms! O effigies of pain!
O spectres busy in a cold, cold gloom!
O lank-eared Phantoms of black-weeded pools!
Why do I know ye? Why have I seen ye? Why
Is my eternal essence thus distraught
To see and to behold these horrors new?
Saturn is fallen, am I too to fall?
Am I to leave this heaven of my rest,
This cradle of my glory, this soft clime,
This calm luxuriance of blissful light,
These crystalline pavilions, and pure fanes,
Of all my lucent empire? It is left
Deserted, void, nor any haunt of mine.
The blaze, the splendour, and the symmetry,
I cannot see -- but darkness, death and darkness."

(John Keats, Hyperion -- A Fragment, extrait // excerpt)

Titans

"[...] Dites, la sombre terre
Se querelle-t-elle avec les sombres forêts qu'elle a nourries,
Et qu'elle nourrit encore, plus avenantes qu'elle?
Peut-elle dénier la suzeraineté des verts bosquets?
Ou l'arbre sera-t-il jaloux de la colombe
Parce qu'elle roucoule et a des ailes de neige
Qui lui permettent de vagabonder et de trouver ses joies?
Nous sommes semblables à ces grands arbres, et nos belles branches
Ont engendré, non de pâles colombes solitaires,
Mais des aigles au plumages d'or, qui nous dominent
Par leur beauté, et qui doivent régner
En vertu de ce droit. Car c'est une loi éternelle
Que le premier en beauté doit être le premier en puissance"

(John Keats, Hyperion -- A Fragment, extrait // excerpt, trad. // transl. Paul de Roux)

Corbeau

Si on avait demandé à Lodvig comment il se sentait, en admettant qu'il ait été capable de répondre, il aurait sans doute déclaré que tout allait bien. Il avait chaud, il n'avait mal nulle part, il était simplement en train de mourir, entouré d'une très grande beauté.
Mais soudain un bruit inconnu lui écorcha les oreilles, un bruit agaçant qui l'arracha à son état d'extase. [...] Quelques instants plus tard, ses oreilles congelées saisirent les bribes d'une voix criarde:
"A gauche, à gauche. Ho, ho, espèce d'enfoiré, ho, ho!"

(Jørn Riel, Racontars Arctiques, extrait // excerpt, trad. // transl. S. Juul et B. Saint Bonnet)

Children

It was the day before 9/11 and throughout the Third World the children woke up crying. In Kuala Lumpur and Kandahar, in Phnom Penh and El Karak and Mogadishu and Gaza. And in the Third World that exists in the First World -- the margins and inner cities, the invisible ghettoes and reservations stretching from the Big Apple to the Golden State, up and down the coasts -- the invisible children woke up crying.

(Harold Jaffe, extrait // excerpt, Terror-Dot-Gov)

Cuisine

A.J. once reserved a table a year in advance Chez Robert where a huge, icy gourmet broods over the greatest cuisine in the world. So baneful and derogatory is his gaze that many a client, under that withering blast, has rolled on the floor and pissed all over himself in convulsive attempts to ingratiate.
So A.J. arrives with six Bolivian indians who chew coca leaves between courses. And when Robert, in all his gourmet majesty, bears down on the table, A.J. looks up and yells: "Hey, Boy! Bring me some ketchup."
(Alternative: A.J. whips out a bottle of ketchup and douses the haute cuisine.)
Thirty gourmets stop chewing at once. You could have heard a soufflé drop. As for Robert, he lets out a bellow of rage like a wounded elephant, runs to the kitchen and arms himself with a meat claver.... The Sommelier snarls hideously, his face turning a strange iridescent purple.... He breaks a bottle of Brut Champagne....'26.... Pierre, the Head Waiter, snatches up a boning knife. Al three chase A.J. through the restaurant with mangled inhuman screams of rage.... Tables overturn, vintage wines and matchless food crash to the floor.... Cries of "Lynch him!" ring through the air. An elderly gourmet with the insane bloodshot eyes of a mandril, is fashioning a hangman's knot with a red velvet curtain cord.... Seeing himself cornered and in imminent danger of dismemberment at least, A.J. plays his trump card.... he throws back his head and lets out a hog call; and a hundred famished hogs he had stationed nearby rush into the restaurant, slopping the haute cuisine. Like a great tree Robert falls to the floor in a stroke where he is eaten by the hogs: "Poor bastards don't know enough to appreciate him," says A.J.

(William S. Burroughs, extrait // excerpt, Naked Lunch)

Wrestle

The group of laborers seated at noontime with their open dinnerkettles, and their wives waiting,
The female soothing a child .... the farmer's daughter in the garden or cowyard,
The woodman rapidly swinging his axe in the woods .... the young fellow hoeing corn .... the sleighdriver guiding his six horses through the crowd,
The wrestle of wrestlers .. two apprentice boys, quite grown, lusty, goodnatured, nativeborn, out on the vacant lot at sundown after work,
The coats vests and caps thrown down .. the embrace of love and resistance,
The upperhold and underhold -- the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes;
The march of firemen in their own costumes -- the play of the masculine muscle through cleansetting trowsers and waistbands,
The slow return from the fire .... the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again -- the listening of the alert,
The natural perfect and varied attitudes .... the bent head, the curved neck, the counting:
Suchlike I love .... I loosen myself and pass freely .... and am at the mother's breast with the little child,
And swim with the swimmer, and wrestle with wrestlers, and march in line with the firemen, and pause and listen and count.

(Walt Whitman, extrait // excerpt, Leaves of Grass)