I

Crazy earth, pregnant with madness, shaking its indecipherable grids in the sidereal night. A livid dawn, a twilight of mother-of-pearl and turquoise casts its ephemeral palette on the monster’s first jolts, crumpled bedfellows, dubious frills. Before long, the painter, devoured by his model, the image will come alive and the ink-stained paper will devour the universe. It will be the vermilion noon of time, the tropical hour when the great intergalactic Medusas appear above stupefied cities, King Kong on the scale of the spheres, mad terrors, terrible Follies shaking their ghostly bells in the dust of destroyed Versailles.

II

The precious machines invented by Kafka and Raymond Roussel turn and, in the silence of the end of the world, sprout shavings where the pink of life still prevails over the purple of decomposition. Sheaves of pink feathers that a heavy wave from the depths will strip away. From which window of Sade’s castles, now sand castles in the cicada-singing furnace of the centuries, falls this gleam of flame, illuminating with a crimson mist the delicate, razor-toothed gears designed to make heavy bodies airy, to transform them into spangles, into shivers, into down, in the spurt of blood and the irritating sound of sawed-off bones?

Marcel BEALU