  Openly, yes, with the naturalness of the hippopotamus or the alligator when it climbs out on the bank to experience the sun, I do these things which I do, which please no one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub- merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object in view was a renaissance; shall I say the contrary? The sediment of the river which encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used to it, it may remain there; do away with it and I am myself done away with, for the patina of circumstance can but enrich what was there to begin with. This elephant skin which I inhabit, fibred over like the shell of the coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light can filter—cut into checkers by rut upon rut of unpreventable experience— it is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the hairy toed. Black but beautiful, my back is full of the history of power. Of power? What is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never be cut into by a wooden spear; through- out childhood to the present time, the unity of life and death has been expressed by the circumference described by my trunk; nevertheless, I perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after all; and I am on my guard; external poise, it has its centre well nurtured—we know where—in pride, but spiritual poise, it has its centre where? My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of the wind. I see and I hear, unlike the wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made to see and not to see; to hear and not to hear; that tree trunk without roots, accustomed to shout its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact by who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that spiritual brother to the coral plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to the I of each, a kind of fretful speech which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is? Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that phenomenon the above formation, translucent like the atmosphere—a cortex merely— that on which darts cannot strike decisively the first time, a substance needful as an instance of the indestructibility of matter; it has looked at the electricity and at the earth- quake and is still here; the name means thick. Will depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no beautiful element of unreason under it? |
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